THE 

RURAL SCHOOL 

FROM WITHIN 

BY M.G.KIRKPATRICK.B.S.,Eh.D. 




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THE RURAL SCHOOL 
FROM WITHIN 



BY 

MARION G. KIRKPATRICK, B.S., Ph.D. 

SPECIALIST IN EDUCATION, DIVISION OF COLLEGE EXTENSION, KANSAS 
STATE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 




PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON 
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 



V. 



' 9. 



L~b I 567 
■K5- 



COPYRIGHT* 1917. BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 



PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 

AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS 

PHILADELPHIA, U. S. A. 



JUL -7 1917 

©CLA4677W 



DEDICATED TO 

THEODORE F. RHODES 

WHO LOVES HIS FELLOWMEN AND WOULD RATHER HEAR HIS 
NEIGHBORS* CHILDREN " SPEAK " AND SING THAN TO HEAR 
A PATRICK HENRY OR A LILLIAN NORDICAJ WHO WOULD 
RATHER SEE A BALL GAME BETWEEN HOME BOYS THAN 
ONE BETWEEN ALL-STAR TEAMS; WHO KNOWS THE JOY 
OF BEING A NEIGHBOR; WHO BELIEVES THAT CREDULITY 
IS NOT ALWAYS A VIRTUE; WHO THINKS THAT CASH REGIS- 
TERS AND COMBINATION LOCKS ARE NOT REFLECTIONS 
UPON INTEGRITY, AND THAT CAREFUL AUDITING AND AC- 
COUNTING MAKE FOR HONEST SERVICE; WHO BELIEVES 
THAT MEN OFTEN BECOME CRIMINAL BY FORCE OF CIRCUM- 
STANCES, AND THAT THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS WHEN PROPERLY 
CONDUCTED ARE THE SAFEGUARDS TO GOOD CITIZENSHIP 



PREFACE 

In no line of work has there been so much aim- 
less effort for improvement as in the rural schools. 
It would be unkind and untrue to say that this 
effort has not always been made by intelligent men 
and women, but it would not be at variance with 
truth to say that many who have written in behalf 
of the rural schools have been those who had little 
first hand experience with the subject which they 
set out to improve. 

With the belief that a rural school education and 
nearly a quarter of a century spent in teaching in 
and adjacent to the rural schools may be a partial 
preparation for so great an undertaking as rural 
school improvement, the author offers this work, 
" The Rural School from Within." 

Several of the chapters are devoted to actual 
experiences which are believed to be typical. If the 
recital of these experiences indicates a love for boys 
and girls, a knowledge of rural home life — of the deep 
love of parents for their children, and of the great 
sacrifices that parents in rural communities are mak- 
ing for their children ; this love and knowledge were 
acquired by many years of close acquaintance with 

1 



2 PREFACE 

a people among whom, and for whom, the writer 
has chosen to spend his life. 

This contribution is made with a hope that it 
may become a factor in determining the aim of rural 
schools, in obtaining a recognition from colleges and 
other higher institutions of learning that education 
must be universal with respect to interests repre- 
sented in the course of study as well as universal 
so far as individuals are concerned. 

Before entering upon the construction of a policy 
for the rural school, the writer gives as faithfully as 
possible his experiences as a teacher of a Kansas 
rural school. These experiences were interesting, and 
dealt with live problems, and throughout their dis- 
cussion it is hoped that the student of pedagogy will 
recognize the employment of sound and progressive 
educative principles and the revealing and elucidating 
of deep-lying fundamentals of discipline and manage- 
ment, which are knotty problems for thinkers and 
experts in education, by such concrete illustrations 
as to be of vital worth to the teacher just entering 
the profession, and helpful to those who have been 
long in the work. 

This book is a story — a story that repeats the 
experiences of thousands of teachers, tens of thou- 
sands of American parents, and of innumerable 
children. It is a story plainly but not bluntly told ; 
it is uncolored by things that might have happened. 



PREFACE 3 

The mistakes of the teacher himself are given 
for the purpose of encouragement to the discouraged 
teacher, and as a danger signal to teachers, parents 
and school boards. They are given to give pub- 
licity to the inefficiency of the untrained teacher and 
to bring plainly to the public mind the importance of 
suitable schools for all the people. 

For kindly criticism offered and interest mani- 
fested in this effort to render a service to the rural 
schools, the author in appreciation thereof acknowl- 
edges the following: 

President Henry Jackson Waters, Dean Edward 
C. Johnson, Professors M. G. Burton, Edwin L. 
Holton, J. W. Searson, Geo. E. Bray, Wm. H. An- 
drews, H. L. Kent, Otis E. Hall, H. W. Davis, N. A. 
Crawford, and W. T. Stratton, of the Kansas State 
Agricultural College, and Mrs. W. T. Stratton and 
Miss Elsie Pauley, Manhattan, Kans'as. 

April, 1917. M ' G ' KlRKPATRICK - 



INTRODUCTION 

The improvement and betterment of American 
rural life is one of the large national problems which 
has grown out of the abandonment of hand farming 
for machine farming, and the change from home 
industry to highly specialized commercial processes. 

In the solution of the rural problem, new ideas 
and new ideals will be required. This solution will 
not consist in copying city methods. It must be a 
growth, a development, and fruition of the best that 
is in the country. The principal forces to be utilized 
must be country forces. Rural betterment is not 
something which may be handed down from above. 
It must come up out of the ranks of the country 
people. The one agency which touches the life of 
all the country people is the rural school. But this 
school has not kept pace with modern progress. It 
has not adjusted itself to changed coditions. It is 
not rendering its fullest service. The course of study 
must be changed to help solve the farmers' economic 
problems, to point the way to a new era of health 
and sanitation in country communities, to place be- 
fore boys and girls new ideals of citizenship. The 
rural school must have a more definitely recognized 

5 



6 INTRODUCTION 

and recognizable purpose, a more direct connective 
with life problems and activities. 

The social problems of the country are large, and 
here, too, the rural school must do its part. We 
shall always have a country-minded people living in 
the country. Any agency which does not recognize 
this fact must fail to get results in the country. In 
the country school must be sympathetic understand- 
ing and foresight; a knowledge of boys and girls, 
and of men and women and the forces which move 
them and lead to success or failure. Inside this 
school there is the reflection of the spirit and life of 
the community. The shortcomings of parents, the 
petty jealousies and sympathetic friendships of the 
small community, the impulsiveness of adolescence, 
the foolishness of youth, the rowdyism so difficult of 
control, the extremes of rural independence, the 
capacity for doing things, the willingness to respond 
to wise leadership — all these are a p'art of the school 
and must be reckoned with for good or for evil. 

The teacher must make all these over, right the 
wrong, improve the bad, stimulate and use the good. 
The course of study, the schoolhouse and equip- 
ment, the machinery of administration, the teacher's 
training and personality are but the means by which 
this development is to be directed. But above all 
the spiritual and moral forces, the men and women, 
the boys and girls of the community must be under- 



INTRODUCTION 7 

stood and used. These constitute the problem. They 
alone offer promise for the future. We would not 
replace them if we could. We must help them to 
grow and to use their talents. 

Few persons who write about rural schools 
understand and love rural life. Few teachers know 
men and women, boys and girls. Few have the good 
sense and the ability to lead and to direct quietly. 
Few are attuned to the countryman's point of view. 
Few are patient with his conservatism. Rowdyism 
in the country is much talked about, but is too often 
condemned and not often enough redirected. Mean- 
ness in the people of the country is given much pub- 
licity, but the lives of far too many Father and 
Mother Roses remain unhonored and unsung. The 
penuriousness of country school boards is proverbial, 
but the stout-hearted, sensible, capable and progres- 
sive William Constads find their way into too little 
of the literature for teachers. 

Those who really wish to love and serve and 
direct country people, who have a vision of manag- 
ing and forming, not of controlling and bossing, who 
have faith in the service the country school can ren- 
der to rural life will get a sane and helpful phil- 
osophy in this look at The Rural School from 
Within. 

Henry Jackson Waters, 

President, Kansas State Agricultural College. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PACK 

I. Living up to Reputation 1 1 

II. Onward Christian Soldiers 19 

III. In Loco Parentis 26 

IV. Bossing One's Employer 38 

V. Having a Part in the Game 45 

VI. Managing Girls 58 

VII. Managing the School Board 68 

VIII. The Community Meeting 80 

IX. Repairing the School Building 85 

X. A Rural Social Problem 94 

XI. Managing Boys 104 

XII. A Teacher's Responsibility as Seen by a Board 

Member 125 

XIII. Christmas Vacation 136 

XIV. Rural Community Interest 148 

XV. The Closing of School 174 

XVI. A School Responsibility 185 

XVII. Mistakes 189 

XVIII. Music, Stories and Play 216 

XIX. Training for Leisure 233 

XX. Suggested Improvements 256 

XXI. Our Teacher 282 






THE RURAL SCHOOL 
FROM WITHIN 

CHAPTER I 

Living Up to Reputation 

I find it impossible to read the " Legend of 

Sleepy Hollow ' without my mind's going back 
twenty-five years to a sheltered nook known as Con- 
stad's Crossing on one of the important tributaries 
of the Kaw. In this neighborhood, fifteen miles 
from a town, I taught my first school. The school- 
house was located on the banks of the heavily wooded 
stream, and established the center of a circular valley 
which was bounded on the north, west, and south by 
high hills, opening at the north and south for the 
inflowing and outflowing of Big Indian Creek. 

My qualifications were none too good, and as the 
school enrolled from sixty to seventy-five pupils, and 
as I was barely twenty years old, it was a matter of 
some surprise at first that I had been given the posi- 
tion. It dawned on me after it was too late to with- 
draw that I had landed a job that no one else wanted ; 
that I had been the only applicant, notwithstanding 
the fact that teachers were plentiful. I later dis- 

11 



12 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

covered, or heard, that our good county superin- 
tendent (over whose bones the mossy marble has 
been standing for many years) -had intentionally 
steered me that way with the fond hope that he 
might give me " mine." This he did in payment for 
the dog's life he had endured a few years previous 
when he was trying to save for the good of America 
an aggregation of Brom Boneses and Bud Meanses, 
whom as he often said, he would have gathered under 
his wings as a hen would her chickens — but they 
would not. Yes, when too late, I found all this out. 
A half mile from the school was my boarding 
place. How vividly do I remember the Saturday 
afternoon before the " First Monday in Septem- 
ber " when I went to the home of Father and Mother 
Rose to board ! The hills were then throwing their 
shadows over and far beyond the house, the holly- 
hocks were all abloom, and everything was quiet. 
Neither of the old people rose to greet me, but from 
their rockers in the vine-clad porch they smiled and 
bade me a welcome that meant more than have all 
the attentions of the uniformed attendants who in- 
fest the modern hostelries and rush for my baggage. 
I inquired for a drink, and was informed that unless 
the spring had quit, I would have no difficulty in 
quenching my thirst. It was no journey down a 
hill to the spring. Just beyond the kitchen door 
stood the springhouse. And such a spring! The 



LIVING UP TO REPUTATION 13 

volume of water was such that enough power might 
have been generated from it to do all the grinding, 
churning and washing on any farm in Kansas and 
also furnish drink for thousands of cattle. For 
weeks this great spring was sweetly singing to me as 
I dropped off to sleep. 

About five o'clock I went to the schoolhouse to 
see that all was in readiness, and found there two 
of the neighborhood women "sweeping out." The 
house did not meet my expectations, but it was satis- 
fying to feel that there were at least two people in 
that community who were interested in education 
and who had a community interest. I thought it 
but proper that I should lend a hand, and was soon 
busily engaged in scraping and digging at question- 
able accretions to the floor. Between our working 
and talking I was informed that the house had not 
been really cleaned since last quarterly meeting, and 
as to-morrow was quarterly meeting day, it was 
thought best to give it a scrubbing. Then I knew 
the ablutions were not in honor of the new teacher 
nor of the cause which he was expecting to promote. 
I learned later, and to my surprise, that all religious 
denominations had free use of the schoolhouse, and, 
excepting during vacation, the teacher was janitor 
ex-afRcio. 

I had read in books on teaching of how the new 
teacher should make a careful survey of the premises, 



14 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

noting deficiencies, etc., and I was not long in observ- 
ing that there were neither crayon nor erasers, maps 
nor globes, shutters nor curtains, and that one of 
the two dilapidated outhouses had turned turtle. 
The only provision for winter was a rick of four- 
foot wood, eight feet high and about a hundred 
feet long. As I turned my face to the hollyhocks, 
I started up a little monologue in which I paid my 
respects to my county superintendent, who, I felt 
quite sure, had done something to me. Father Rose 
was yet rocking on the porch. He arose when I 
entered, saying, " Supper is ready." 

You who have had the good fortune to sit at 
such a table, I congratulate. Everything was spot- 
lessly clean. The colors, if not associated with so 
many fond recollections, might not appeal to me ; but 
even at this late day a feeling of love and goodness 
sweeps over me whenever I behold blue plates, cups 
and saucers, green milk pitchers and green salt-cellars. 
Never in all those nine months was there food on the 
table that did not meet my most hearty approval, and 
I fancy myself somewhat of an epicurean. Never do 
I see blue dishes but I have a vision of an experience 
that marks my entrance into a life of responsibilities. 
I sat at this table with these dear, kind people whose 
every look was one of love and sympathy. The table 
was loaded with everything I liked, and I at once for- 
got quarterly meetings and foreboding woodpiles, 



LIVING UP TO REPUTATION 15 

and mentally resolved that after a respectful silence 
I'd do the right thing to that cooking. 

In reverential attitude, I bowed my head, waiting 
for a blessing which I felt was sure to fall from the 
lips of my venerable host. I have never forgotten 
that mistake. He pronounced no blessing, but when 
he spoke, it was simply to say, " Brother, return 
thanks." Once I was riding on the pilot of a large 
locomotive and we ran into a dray wagon, and my 
life was barely saved — once I broke through the ice 
on the Missouri River and clung to the edge with 
freezing hands till rescued — upon several occasions 
I have met death head on; but never yet have I 
experienced such a shock as the one I received at that 
evening meal, when the words, " Brother, return 
thanks," were pronounced. After the shock, I 
gathered my few scattered wits together, and I 
recalled fragments of my father's grace. These 
fragments were ill put together. I knew it. It was 
entirely superfluous for Mother Rose to cast a pity- 
ing glance at her husband or to have that pitying 
glance returned. 

I discovered for the first time that I had assumed 
certain responsibilities not mentioned in the contract. 
I discovered that I had at once become a man; that 
passive membership in a church was no longer to be 
my religious status; that the written recommenda- 
tions that I had got from friends, who felt I ought 



16 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

to have a chance, had given me a reputation that 
would stretch me to the breaking point to measure 
up to. I almost wished that that meal might never 
end, for, if it did, it would mean a repetition of the 
experience the next time. 

After supper I sought the sitting room and the 
daily paper. Since they received mail but once a 
week I soon realized that it was unreasonable to 
expect a daily paper. The only reading matter in 
sight, however, was a King James' Translation and 
a Dr. Jayne's Prognostication of weather and pro- 
mulgation of " eternal-life " remedies. I made in- 
quiry for the weekly papers, and, imagine my sur- 
prise, when I was told, " We take no papers. We 
discovered years ago that papers tend to inter fere with 
one's religious enjoyment." Picture my dilemmja. 
Twenty miles from home, no longer one of the boys, 
no sweetheart within twenty miles, nor likely to be, 
nothing to read but the Bible and Dr. Jayne's Alma- 
nac, and visions of that county superintendent laugh- 
ing and telling his wife of my predicament How 
the mills of the gods do grind ! 

Picture me on the following beautiful Sunday 
morning — I, who had been the problem of problems 
for teachers and professors — running the gauntlet 
when I made my way into the schoolhouse for Sun- 
day School, which came before Quarterly Meeting. 
If your grief is not too great, behold me secretly 



LIVING UP TO REPUTATION 17 

praying, fervently too, that I should not be called 
upon to lead in prayer. That morning for the first 
time in my life I lost faith in the efficacy of prayer. 
It was a poor prayer, it was my first in public — but 
I was living up to a reputation that my friends had 
given me. 

Talk about rural leadership! Those people led 
me into more grief in twenty-four hours than I ever 
supposed was in the whole world, and I was twenty 
years old, and had been to college. I am not of a sus- 
picious nature, nor did I need to be to guess who was 
the most talked of young man in the Sunday School. 
I was not sensitive, nor was it necessary that I should 
be, to feel considerably cut up, to have half the 
young men whose class I was given to teach, get up 
and saunter out before I had half finished distorting 
the Gospel that Paul preached to the Ephesians. 
Before that quarterly service was over I had so com- 
mitted myself to a policy of religious activity that 
retreat would have been ruinous. 

Having been brought up according to the strictest 
of Presbyterian parents, and believing with all my 
heart that " A Sabbath well spent brings a week of 
content,' ' I put in the afternoon attending church 
service, and also the evening. The evening service 
began at early candle light and lasted a long time. 

You read in books of the encounters and experi- 
ences of the young teacher. Read this please, believ- 



18 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

ing. Some hardened old teacher may say what he 
would have done; but, young teacher, what would 
you do to-day, if you had to meet such conditions ? 
I had been a very popular young man. I had lots and 
lots of friends and no enemies, except a few old teach- 
ers, and who was caring about them ? But out here I 
was a stranger, entirely unknown to the young people. 
Can you imagine my utter surprise when that 
night on my way home, I heard my name ringing out 
clearly in a song improvised by a bunch of the boys ? 
They sang it long and loud — and I still think, 
abominably — and the minister who walked home 
with me laughed at my discomfiture and shame. 
Can you imagine the feelings that passed through 
my mind after I had laid me down to sleep, and 
prayed the Lord my soul to keep? Do you believe 
me when I say that I hoped I might die before I 
waked? Do vou believe that one can have such 
experiences without ever thereafter sympathizing 
with young teachers and wishing that he might make 
their burdens less heavy and their pathways more 
smooth ? 



CHAPTER II 
Onward Christian Soldiers 

None but the initiated can appreciate what the 
first day of school in the country means. 

The teacher in a city school knows nothing about 
it. The city teacher goes before her pupils with a 
course of study outlining in detail the work of the 
day. She has a list of all the pupils and the char- 
acteristics of each. Floors have been thoroughly 
cleaned ; blackboards, erasers, maps and charts have 
the appearance of never having been used ; and the 
teacher herself, after a vacation in the Rockies. 
Ozarks, or Catskills, bears a most markedly rejuve- 
nated appearance. She has a ready-made program 
and when the hour for beginning arrives, she has a 
janitor to press the button. Thus does her school 
open, and she experiences a day so uneventful that 
she congratulates herself with accomplishing so much 
so soon, failing to recognize the fact that during 
those summer months when vacation days were on, 
superintendents and principals were carefully work- 
ing out the problems which she never sees and prob- 
ably never knows exist. 

To a limited degree, there is no greater oppor- 
tunity for development than that which knocks the 

19 



20 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

first day upon the country schoolhouse door where 
the teacher is teaching her first school. To her is 
granted unlimited sway. It is a survive or perish 
proposition — a survival of the fittest, and consider- 
ing the voyage through eddies and whirlpools, down 
rapids and over cataracts, yesterday amid baffling 
calms, to-day in areas of high barometric pressures, 
and to-morrow in hurricanes and cloudbursts, it is 
a marvel that so many live till the day when it may 
be said to them, " Well done, thou good and faithful, 
accept a position in the village school. You have 
been faithful over many things, you are now made 
ruler over few." The invitation is accepted, and she 
who has dared to glean in the fields of Boaz and he 
who has toiled in the vineyard are made members 
of that royal throng who sing, " My Country, 'Tis 
of Thee," accompanied by a Steinway Grand, or a 
Victor, in a hall where " licking and learning " part 
ways, never more to meet till the real life problems 
are met. 

I have never made pretensions to singing ability, 
but I opened my first school, after reading selections 
from Proverbs, by singing " Onward Christian 
Soldiers/' while I held by the hand one Miss Kansas 
Denman, who had persisted in talking while her 
teacher was reading, " The tongue of the wise useth 
knowledge aright, but the mouth of fools poureth 
out foolishness.'" Kansas was a diminutive mortal 



ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS 21 

from a physical standpoint, but a giantess in dis- 
obedience. 

Miss Kansas was little, but she was old. One 
reason for mentioning her age second is, that, as a 
writer, I believe in mentioning facts in their chrono- 
logical order. I knew she was little before I knew 
she was old. I did not know she was seventeen till 
I had taken the census. I did not know till after 
school that day that she was the sweetheart of the 
biggest young man on Indian Creek. Of course, her 
father was a member of my board. 

When I was a very small boy I determined to 
teach school. It was always my intention to teach 
but one term, and during that one term, I intended 
to see that the girls enjoyed no special privileges. 
They would get a square deal but they need not ex- 
pect any better treatment than was given the boys. 
I grew up with that resolve, and it was my first 
experience in discipline to lead Miss Kansas to the 
front. I had not told her to desist from talking, but 
I had stopped reading and looked at her. She only 
looked and went on with her pouring out, so I im- 
mediately proceeded to do a little retrieving. And 
this is how Kansas came to be in hand while her 
teacher sang " Onward Christian Soldiers, marching 
as to war." I have read many, many books on dis- 
cipline. I have read much on moral suasion, and 
know all about the Law of Natural Consequences, 



22 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

and that hasty action is unwise; but I have never 
failed to visit summary punishment if pupils per- 
sisted in evil after knowing I was conscious of their 
misconduct and disapproved of it. 

My first day's enrollment was fifty- four. This 
was in the days prior to text-book uniformity. We 
had the greatest variety of books that I had seen up 
to that time. It was greater the next day, and con- 
tinued to increase until the enrollment was complete, 
about the middle of December. I am not at all cer- 
tain that the text-book condition was a really bad 
one. It did give variety. Some of the readers were 
new to me, and almost interesting. The arithmetics 
were good. The grammars were good. The his- 
tories were poor, so were the geographies. The first 
two subjects were my favorite studies. The last two 
were my poorest ones. I have always noticed that 
teachers are most likely to condemn texts in subjects 
about which they know nothing, or which they dis- 
like. I was no exception. We had only two good 
books in the school, arithmetic and grammar. 

As I look back upon my work in that school, I 
see many, many vital mistakes that I made, my 
first one being an attempt to teach school. I had 
made no particular preparation for the work. I had 
gone into it with the thought of teaching one term, 
and Methods of Study or the Art of Teaching had 
not been any definite part of my school work. In 



ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS 23 

my schoolboy days, how to avoid difficult tasks and 
harass our natural enemy, the teacher, were our 
majors. In a way such a problem may be a prepara- 
tion for teaching. It has this in its favor : the teacher 
with such an experience always knows about what to 
expect on the other side of the fence, and he does 
not need a periscope to see it. To no other person 
do the straws so accurately denote " From whence 
comes the wind." 

As I looked over that bunch of boys with their 
pennants flying, my heart went out to them. It was 
only duty that restrained and kept me from enlist- 
ing with the enemy, against any power that existed 
for the purpose of government. They were my 
friends, although, in their ignorance, they thought 
they were enemies. Those girls, I see them to this 
day! They were not very bad. They never were, 
but I would that they had been bad ! There was that 
lukewarmness, that disposition to look with approval 
upon boys' wrongdoings, that is so damaging to 
discipline and yet leaves nothing sufficiently tangible 
to implicate the real instigators of most wrongdoing. 

I have already stated that I made many mis- 
takes, but I did some things quite well. I had made 
some preparation for my first day's work. I had a 
tentative program. I got the names and ages and 
classified the school without assuming any obligation 
from the board or predecessor. I even went so far 



24 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

as to carry a broom from home in order that I might 
present as good an appearance to the children as the 
Mothers in Israel had presented, by my assistance, 
on the preceding day. 

Modern educators are agreed that a real teacher 
must have an aptitude for vicariousness. Without 
comment, I submit for your consideration: The 
teacher who has an aptitude for the vicariousness re- 
quired in case cited is abundantly supplied with 
aptitude. 

I have said twice that I made mistakes. What 
some of those mistakes were I'll tell in a later 
chapter. One mistake that I believe I made the first 
day was in attempting too much. I realized that I 
had a big job. I knew that there were an even 
hundred of my old associates who were wondering 
every minute of that day "how I was making it," 
and I was determined that I would be aboard ship 
in case she went to the bottom and that I would 
never go back home if I failed to handle the job. 
Maybe that determination was a mistake. In years 
since, when I have seen teachers, not in rural schools 
but in town schools, working and giving their very 
lives for an apparently unsympathetic, unappreciative 
public, I have wondered if it would not be better 
viking-like to head the death bark for the open sea, 
with none aboard to effect her return, or Samson 



ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS 25 

like, die with the Philistines, rather than to pursue 
a forlorn hope. 

I well remember as a child how impatiently I 
often waited for four o'clock. It nearly always 
seemed a long, long time. This four o'clock was 
longer in coming than any previous one, but it came, 
and so did five o'clock before the room was in readi- 
ness for another day. I have done every kind of 
work about a farm. I have bound wheat, and 
stacked it; I have cut corn and husked corn, and 
scooped it ten feet high into a crib; I have worked 
in every position around a threshing machine, and 
have followed a team ten hours a day in grading on 
public works, but I never was quite so tired as at 
the close of my first day's school. For $1.87 J4 
and board myself! 

Along with my other tastes I am particularly 
fond of good pictures. Among popular favorites 
there is one picture that is classed as a masterpiece : 
End of Day, by Adan, but this picture I absolutely 
refuse to like. For my readers who do not know this 
picture, I give this brief description: Man going 
home from work, carrying hoe and rake on his 
shoulders. A good companion picture for that one 
could have been made from me and my broom. I've 
always been thankful Adan did not see me first. 



CHAPTER III 

In Loco Parentis 

How many times have we heard persons say, 
" Had I my life to live over again! " 

If I had my life to live over again, and expected 
to be a teacher, I would make a thorough prepara- 
tion for my work. I am certain I would not know- 
ingly hunt up a rural school and occupy the place 
intended for a teacher, and draw money from its 
treasury to educate myself sufficiently to help me 
land a position in a city school or mayhap, a college. 
I have been a high school principal and city super- 
intendent, and without hope of favor or fear of con- 
demnation, I make the assertion that the teachers 
who are doing the most for this country, who work 
the hardest and get the least remuneration from a 
money consideration aire the rural teachers. No 
other position in the school system of America re- 
quires more skill and efficiency. 

There is no teacher that should receive higher 
pay than a teacher who can take a rural school and 
ably meet its requirements. Yet the rural teacher 
is not meeting with the success that her efforts merit. 
Her efforts are short on securing results for many 
reasons. Lack of preparation is one of the greatest. 
26 



IN LOCO PARENTIS 27 

No enterprise suffers for lack of labor, provided 
the labor requirements are low. There is always 
a large class of people who must market their wheat 
without waiting for it to go through the sweat. 
There is always a class of teachers who would rather 
sell their services for $40 or $50 per month than to 
go through the sweat and sell for $200 per month. 
The rural school always has been the market for this 
cheap labor. Why men who willingly spend large 
sums on crop improvement and animal improve- 
ment, often paying a fabulous price for a choice 
brood animal, are so short-sighted as not to see that 
their children, for whom they are doing so much, 
need better intellectual advantages, is one of the 
wonders of our age. 

My boyhood home was nine miles from the 
county seat, and two miles from a town of 400 in- 
habitants. It would have been better for our com- 
munity in a moral and social sense if the town had 
been one hundred and ninety-eight miles farther 
away. A town of that size is sufficiently large to get 
enough of the cheap and tinseled to keep out all 
worthy enterprises. In our boasted age of oratory 
and music, and art, our village offered nothing ex- 
cept a market and a loafing place for boys. As a 
social centre, it was destructive to the best interests 
of its surrounding communities. 

A town of that size can be without the 



28 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

good qualities of a city or of the rural community. 
It often leads a precarious existence, living entirely 
upon its wits and the shortcomings of its rural 
neighbors. Its churches were a little too good to 
warrant our having our own country church or of 
going nine miles to the larger and better town. The 
schools were the same; they were neither rural nor 
city ; they had neither an urban nor a rural interest, 
and a boy who got his education there was unfitted 
for the farm and misfitted for the city. This was a 
wrong condition and one which the small town of 
to-day is fast solving. The small towns of to-day are 
recognizing that their interests, social, educational, 
and economic are rural, and are rapidly adjusting 
their institutions to me^et changing ideals. But it is 
entirely possible for them to have very different 
schools from those they now have, and not have 
better schools. Their social advantages can easily 
be different without being better. Small towns and 
rural communities constitute a type that has special 
interests and for the perpetuation of those interests, 
their schools, clubs, and churches should exist. 

Constad's Crossing, as stated, was fifteen miles 
from town and was distinctively rural. Its school 
was a social centre. However, the social activity was 
limited to< religious worship, singing schools, liter- 
ary society, spelling schools and an occasional party. 
The first, religious worship, took precedence over 



IN LOCO PARENTIS 29 

all the others. Every denomination that had the fol- 
lowing of one or more families took its turn. Some- 
times when each had had its turn, some of the 
younger enthusiasts, for social reason rather than 
through religious zeal, would put on a two or three 
weeks' prayer and song service. Taking it the year 
through they had a very good time. In the winter 
when the crops were all garnered, society was sure 
to be somewhat busy. 

These, however, were conditions as yet unfa- 
miliar to me. How fortunate is the teacher who, 
during the hard trials of the day, can look forward 
to a home-like boarding place where she may go 
when the day is ended, and find all pleasant and 
happy, a home with a family which has the respect 
of the community, a home where all the gossip, 
silly and malicious, is not carried and promulgated, 
a home with parents who have led noble lives, and 
have sent into the world noble sons and daughters. 
Such a boarding place was mine. True, Father and 
Mother Rose had begun by laying on me almost 
insupportable burdens, but so soon, I was beginning 
to see in their lives the peace and comfort that 
comes from the forgetting of self and living for 
others. It was in this home where books were scarce 
and where efficiency methods in teaching, educative 
processes, psychology and other fundamentals were 
unheard of, that I found that the first characteristic 



30 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

of a teacher is love for his fellowmen. It was 
here that I was soon to learn the blessedness of giv- 
ing; it was here I acquired a passionate desire to 
teach — to do more for the boys and girls committed 
to my care, but I shall not say more at this time of 
what this home did for me. 

As I approached that home with my dinner basket 
filled with books and the broom over a shoulder, I 
began to think of the welcome that would be ex- 
tended me, of the sympathy and encouragement that 
would be offered. 

Father Rose is sleeping in his big chair, Mother 
Rose must be in the kitchen. I go on through, put 
down my basket, thank her for the broom, take up 
the water pail and bring it full from the spring. 
Mother Rose looks so sweet when she says, " It 
makes me feel like Dick was home to have you 
around." 

I was looking forward to an evening at home 
with my books. 

The first day, notwithstanding the fact that I had 
made some preparation, was far from satisfying to 
me, and I felt it must have been somewhat disap- 
pointing to my pupils. I discovered soon after reach- 
ing home, that the evening service was to be attended 
as a matter of course, and while I felt the need of 
staying at home, I had not the temerity to make the 
suggestion. 



IN LOCO PARENTIS 31 

At the supper table our conversation took a 
peculiar turn. First, I was asked concerning certain 
children. Were they at school ? Did they have books ? 
How were they dressed? This last question was 
one upon which I could not give very decided in- 
formation. In fact, I was not absolutely certain in 
all cases about the first two. There were those 
among my pupils about whom I could have told all 
these things, but I was being asked about the no- 
bodies — the Jones girls and the Longley boys and the 
Burns children and I did not know whether they 
were in or not. I thought so. It seemed that I had 
written their names, but that was as far as I could 
go. I knew the Marshalls and the Gordons and the 
Mathews were there, but I did not know for sure 
about any regarding whom they inquired. I did not 
merely imagine that Mother Rose was disappointed ; 
it was too evident. 

Upon inquiry as to whether any of these families 
were related to her, she said they were not. She 
told me that the Jones children, — there were five of 
them, the oldest, fourteen, and the youngest, five, — 
had lost their mother a few weeks before, and that 
their father was very poor and hardly able to work. 
He had expected to start them all to school. Mother 
Rose was afraid Rachel, the oldest one, would have 
a hard time keeping her house work done and keep- 
ing her two young brothers and sisters in school. 



32 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

The Longley boys were from a new family that 
had just moved into the neighborhood. They, too, 
were poor people, and Father Rose had let the father 
have money to buy books for the boys. 

The Burns children were worst of all. They 
made their home with a good-for-nothing uncle who 
lived back in the woods in a log cabin. His main 
asset consisted of hounds, and his principal business 
was coon hunting, trapping and boozing. They 
spoke very guardedly about this last fault, saying 
that it was like the first two, a weakness, and they 
doubted if he could help it. They hoped he would 
attend the meetings that were to be started in a few 
weeks by a noted evangelist and said he would be a 
good citizen if he could be made over and would 
kill his hounds and quit drinking. 

This meeting to-night was not a regular service? 

No, it was hardly a regular service. It was a 
preparatory service, preparing for the revival which 
they would soon start. 

Our supper was over, and I had not been asked 
how I liked my school, nor how many pupils I had 
enrolled, nor how I had succeeded without a previous 
report in organizing the school. I had just been 
asked about the Joneses, Longleys and Burnses. 

In a former chapter was mentioned an aptitude 
for vicariousness as being one of the characteristics 
which every teacher should possess. This same 



IN LOCO PARENTIS 33 

authority, George Herbert Palmer, gives as a 
second characteristic, " A willingness to be for- 
gotten." With becoming modesty I add as a third 
" A willingness to be unnoticed," for truly, he that 
shall find his life, first must lose it. 

As I walked to church that evening my thoughts 
had taken a peculiar turn. Three hours before, as 
I came home from school they were centred wholly 
and absolutely upon one thing, and I believe I am 
using the word in moderation, " Myself." The 
thoughts were not most worthy ones. They were 
not upon how well or how poorly I had done my 
work, not what an abundance of room I had 
for improvement, but were thoughts of commis- 
eration, and whether or not I had made a favorable 
impression. 

Now, I was thinking of those poor children — 
the Joneses, Longleys and Burnses, and wondering if 
I might be able to help them. I had shied away 
from one white-haired, hatchet- faced, dirty little 
boy, who tried to stand too close to me. He 
had put his little hand on my arm, and I remem- 
bered now that I had laid it off. As I thought about 
it, it seemed to me his name was Jones. Then the 
words of Mother Rose came hovering about me, 
" lost their mother a few weeks before, father poor 
and hardly able to work, five of them and the 
youngest only five years old." This little white- 
3 



34 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

haired boy was but little more than five years old. 
He was not a Marshall, nor a Gordon nor a 
Mathews. The Marshalls and Gordons were all 
bright looking, clean and well dressed. 

In the brief course in pedagogy, I had mastered 
the words " in loco parentis." My knowledge of 
that phrase had led me to believe that the teacher 
has exactly the same authority over the child as the 
parent ; that in applying the law to a case of corporal 
punishment, the status of the teacher is the same as 
that of the parent; and that he is amenable to the 
law for cruel and unusual punishment just as much, 
but no more, than the parent. Now the words " in 
loco parentis " came to me, but they came in a new 
dress and with an entirely different significance. 
Here were as many as ten children from poor homes, 
who had probably been in my school that day. They 
had come long distances ; they had made their prepa- 
ration at much sacrifice. In one case the father had 
borrowed money to buy books and had gone fifteen 
miles for them. They had come, some of them, to a 
school for the first time, and others were strangers 
in this particular school. What attention had they 
received from me ? Had I given them a kind word, a 
pleasant look, or a friendly pat? Had I given that 
whole school individually or collectively anything 
that meant anything to them or ever would? 

As I reached the schoolhouse I saw that the 



IN LOCO PARENTIS 35 

people were gathering. In fact, the hitch racks that 
ran the full length of the two sides of the school 
yard were crowded with teams, hitched to all sorts 
of conveyances; buggies with tops, carryalls and 
wagons with spring seats, and wagons with seat 
boards. This, remember, was twenty-five years ago. 
There were no automobiles in that aggregation. 
Could you find such an array of vehicles at any 
gathering in the Middle West to-day? I leave that 
question to you, my reader. Attention ! so fast does 
time fly, that we must once in awhile pause and 
think, and then we must stand aghast. In 1901, in 
a thriving town in the Middle West, I was superin- 
tendent of the schools. My wife, who was always 
interested in children, sent me a message asking if I 
would please dismiss the schools and let the children 
go down town, that there was an automobile down 
there. It is needless to say that her wishes were 
granted, and not only did the children go down to 
see the automobile, but the teachers all went, and 
the superintendent went along, and it may not be 
aside the point to say that he met his wife there 
and she had her little boy there, and her neighbors 
were there and they had their little boys and little 
girls there, also, to see the automobile. 

Did you notice that I said my wife sent me a 
message. I did not say that she " called me up." 
No, there was not a 'phone in the town. She sent 



36 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

the message. Let me tell you something about that 
to«wn. The school census is little, if any, more to- 
day than in 1901, but it has a new high school 
building costing over $30,000. It has finely equipped 
laboratories. It has as good a heating, ventilating 
equipment as there is in America. It has doubled, 
aye, trebled its high school teaching force. 

What about Constad's Crossing? Well, there 
are no wagons with the high backed spring seats, 
nor with seat boards either. There are a few back 
numbers who ride in carryalls and top buggies, but 
mostly the conveyances are automobiles. Indian 
Creek is still flowing south. The schoolhouse is 
still there. The wood pile is just as natural as 
though it had never been burned. The school is not 
much better graded. They have but one teacher, 
but sufficient unto> the day is the evil thereof. 

Before I went into this byway, running off after 
carnal things, I was on my way to church. I was 
having misgivings as to my shortcomings, and in- 
stead of turning in, I walked on past, and as I fol- 
lowed the road that led off into the woods, I could 
hear them singing " Down at the Cross where I first 
saw the light, Glory to His Name." This, at this 
particular time, had no message to me. I had a 
job which bid fair to become my cross, and the more 
I saw of that job, the more I felt my inability, my 
unworthiness. Here was a neighborhood of good 



IN LOCO PARENTIS 37 

people. There were three distinct lines of activity 
— agriculture, church and school. It was a rich 
farming community. People were generally pros- 
perous. It was from a moral point of view equal to 
the place where I had lived. Religiously, it was dif- 
ferent from that to which I was accustomed. I did 
not approve of all that they did, and they far from 
approved of my method of religious attack. 

I finally came to a bridge crossing our already 
familiar stream, and there I seriously planned my 
work for the morrow. My planning involved no 
improvements on discipline. Order in methods of 
work is mine by inheritance. I want pupils to do 
right, and when they do not, we just stop and tighten 
up and start again. I learned early in my farm life 
that a stitch in time is always advisable. I planned 
my work so that every pupil would be sure to get 
some attention every day. Even though it were but 
a question, a word, some form of recognition would 
be accorded the poorest as well as the richest, the 
slowest as well as the quickest. I would, at the very 
earliest moment, find out the children who most 
needed my care and I would be "in loco parentis " 
in so far as I was able. I walked home that night 
believing I was equal to the emergency. I resolved 
that the school should no longer hold third place in 
that community, if I could prevent it, and that if it 
did hold but third place it would be worthy of it. 



CHAPTER IV 

Bossing One's Employer 

Much has been written by educators on the im- 
portance of a good beginning, doing well the work 
of the first day. It is well to do the first day's work 
well. It is proper and good business to come before 
your school the first morning with a full knowledge 
of your work, but the second day is the day of days. 
The first day the teacher is new- and the pupils are 
slow to make advances toward unruly behavior till 
they know their ground. Besides, on the first day, 
the pupils themselves are an unorganized group. By 
the second day there is a tendency, if ever there is 
one, or try out the new teacher. This is particularly 
true in case the teacher is a beginner without 
reputation. 

Oh, the enthusiasm of youth! Could I go 
through that experience again ! To youth all things 
are possible. Youth is fearless, vigorous, precipi- 
tate. It is in youth that we would control not only 
those who would direct us but the laws of the uni- 
verse as well. 

On the second morning I was at school at eight 
o'clock, and from that day to* my last work in the 
public schools, I have missed that time for arriving 
at my post of duty but by a very few minutes. 
38 



BOSSING ONE'S EMPLOYER 39 

The house that I had left thoroughly swept the 
evening before was in a worse condition than it was 
before I had swept it. The floor was strewn with 
bits of paper, whittlings and tobacco. The song I 
had heard the night before had come rushing into 
my mind — " Down at the Cross, where I first found 
the light, Glory to His name ! ' To what was this 
condition due? Why would a people who* were ap- 
parently good, earnest, Christian people, permit the 
building to which their children were to go for the 
greater part of the year, to be treated in such a way 
as to make it so insanitary? Why this condition? 
Was it the fault of my predecessors? Had they 
suffered these conditions to exist? If so, why? 
Had they borne it all patiently, hoping to curry 
favor, or had they tried to improve conditions and 
failed? Three teachers last year! Well, if they 
had hoped to curry favor by enduring such indig- 
nities, they had hoped in vain, for the popular ver- 
dict was, " They failed." 

I had heard what teachers had done with school 
boards, and I knew it could be done again, and be- 
sides, the law was all on my side. I would go to 
that board and demand that the schoolroom be put 
in a sanitary condition, and state that school would 
not be called till my demands were complied with. 
I knew my rights and I would stand for them. 

To the young teacher I will say the following: 



40 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

Look with suspicion upon the teacher who tells you 
how he bosses the school board. He is either a liar 
or a one-termer, and the probabilities are that he is 
both. This is no more true of the teacher than of 
the preacher, the dry goods clerk or the bank clerk. 
Underlings are found boasting in the street corners 
and other public places of how they have laid it down 
to the boss, and of how the boss came beautifully to 
earth, most graciously begged forgiveness, thanked 
them for their suggestions, and was pleasant and 
deferential ever afterwards. 

One finds these independent, dictatorial fellows 
in every walk of life pretending to lead railroad 
superintendents, college presidents and chancellors 
dogs' lives, and we are made to 1 wonder why these 
gentlemen do not indicate their subjection by more 
distressed and cringing spirits. I repeat it, these 
men who claim they boss their superiors are liars or 
one-termers and probably both. I would not use 
such strong terms in my condemnation of the people 
if I thought the ends I seek were not justified by the 
means. The end I seek in this particular case is to 

* 

convince the young people (all others know from 
experience or otherwise) of the foolishness of such 
a course, and its thorough lack of the desired re- 
sults. The teacher who attempts to run a school 
without cooperation of the board is too foolish to 
deserve success. The minister who attempts to 



BOSSING ONE'S EMPLOYER 41 

" drive " his church board meets with but one result 
and that is failure. And the employee who will not 
work with his superior, be he bank president, college 
president, or railroad president, will be hunting a 
job, while the others stay and " live to fight another 
day." Even Uncle Sam, the dearest of men, expects 
subordination and faithful service from the lowest 
paid postmaster to the president, and he is seldom 
mistaken in his men. Many a young man has lost 
his position while " contending for his rights/' The 
fact must never be lost sight of that every question 
may have two sides, and the employee is seldom in 
a position to see the other side. 

Closing the schoolhouse door, I made straight for 
the home of my nearest board member. As I walked, 
I thought once more of home, and for the first time, 
wished that I might have my father to advise me. 
I then began to assemble some of his advice that I 
never had made use of, and that was, therefore, as 
good as new. First, he was always an advocate 
of moderation, and his favorite proverb was, " He 
that is slow to anger is better than the mighty ; and 
he that ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh a city." 
He had homelier sayings and two of them came into 
my mind as I went to boss my board. " Never try 
to lift till you can get your feet firmly on the ground." 
' In one respect, and possibly two or three, men 
are like hogs; when you drive them, do it without 



42 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

their knowledge or you won't get far; just drift 
them." 

I arrived at the home of William Constad in a 
few minutes. He was the member of the board. He 
was the one who had had most to do in employing me. 
He was a pleasant, quiet man of few words, but was 
a power in his community. He had three children in 
school, two daughters and one son. The daughters 
were eighteen and twenty years of age and the son 
was fifteen. He laughed and said, " You are sure 
starting in early." 

At first I thought he was speaking of the time of 
day, but he went on to say, " I was mighty glad to 
hear how you took care of little Kansas yesterday. 
You sure did get the right one, and you did it early, 
too. You know my son Bill goes with Kansas, but 
it don't make any difference, and it wouldn't make 
any difference if it did. That girl's cost this district 
enough to educate a dozen boys and girls clear 
through college. She's mighty popular with the 
boys, and a boy never makes a bad move but what 
that girl's got a smile by way of reward. She en- 
courages everything that's ornery, and she sympa- 
thizes with the culprit when he is caught." 

After thanking him for his encouraging remarks, 
and assuring him that it was not my intention to 
attempt lifting a very big load till I got my feet 
firmly on the ground, I bade him good morning. He 



BOSSING ONE'S EMPLOYER 43 

extended his hand to me and I shook it, but he held 
my hand instead of shaking it, and he said, " I do 
hope we can have a good school this year. I'm 
mighty glad you came over. There's one criticism I 
feel like making on nearly all the teachers we've ever 
had. They never come around except when they 
want their pay or a holiday. I wish you could call 
on the other members soon, and let's get started in 
right. These are miighty fine people in this com- 
munity. They are somewhat longer on church than 
I am, but that's no failing. We never lock no doors 
out here, and the poor never suffer if their wants are 
found out." 

Before I got loose my hand his eldest daughter 
came out on her way to school. She came up and 
was soon bossing the board in my most approved 
fashion : She said, " Pa, do you know there is no 
chalk at the school ? ' Pa said he hadn't thought 
chalk in months. " Do you know, Pa, there is no 
broom?" " No," (Pa had not thought brooms for 
a long, long time). " How did you get along yes- 
terday without these things?' I explained that I 
had borrowed for the emergency. 

" Well," he explained, " the board lives so far 
apart that it seldom ever gets together. Do you 
know we have not had a board meeting since the 
annual meeting last April? We talked that day 
about several things that ought to be done. We 



44 THE RUEAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

• 

hired Graham to put in the wood, but that's as far 
as we really got." 

This was my opportunity to do some drifting. 
I inquired if it would meet his wishes to have me see 
the other members and suggest a " get-together," 
and if he would object to my meeting with them. 
He drifted fine. He said any date the other two 
wanted would suit him, and he thought my presence 
would be acceptable to all. 

I taught school the second day in a room not to 
my liking, but I had grown in my own esteem. I 
had accepted a bad situation, and had mastered my- 
self sufficiently to make a somewhat favorable im- 
pression upon the man whose influence I must have 
if I wished to do any good for that community. I 
was in a fair way to have a meeting of the board 
and for that meeting I had determined to make suit- 
able preparations. 



CHAPTER V 

Having a Part in the Game 

When a boy, I was very fond of Dickens. As 
a man, I am fond of Dickens. Among educators, 
Dickens, in my estimation, easily holds first place. 
He was England's greatest educational reformer. 
His views were not given to the world under high 
sounding titles, which are often used to enhance the 
selling of a book rather than to enlighten the pur- 
chasers upon its contents. He never wrote a book 
entitled "Child Study"; but he taught indirectly, 
through his novels, millions of people ; and he taught 
more effectively of the rights of children and of the 
training of children than has any other educator of 
modern times. 

In his several novels, he deals with over twenty 
schools, each with a definite purpose. He discovered 
or invented a greater number of probable characters 
than all other English writers combined. He has a 
character for every man and one must be an expert 
to avoid seeing himself in the great looking-glasses of 
literature made and patented by Charles Dickens. 

In his Martin Chuzzlewit there is a character, 
Mark Tapley. It has long been my opinion that the 
young man who can read Martin Chuzzlewit and can 

45 



46 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

then emulate Mark Tapley has a reasonable success 
assured. 

Mark Tapley is looking for trouble — trouble so 
great that he cannot overcome it. He wants the ex- 
perience. He wants his manhood tested. When he 
is cheated and defrauded out of a large part of his 
fortune he is encouraged. That is some trouble, but 
not great enough to lay him low. That might dis- 
courage a weak man, or even an average man, but 
he claims to be more than an average man. The 
ordinary man gives up to just ordinary troubles, 
but he is more than an ordinary man, and it 
requires more than a financial reverse to put him 
down. He suffers other reverses, becomes sick and 
almost penniless thousands of miles from home, 
but Dickens makes him stand a man in this world of 
discouraging troubles. He makes him say after all 
has been laid on him and it would seem that he 
would break and be crushed under it all, " I'm a man. 
I could stand more than this. An ordinary man 
might get discouraged and give up, but not I. I am 
more than an ordinary man." 

What an encouragement such an example must 
be to the young man starting in life and meeting 
with reverses! What a blessing to the world it 
would be if all men were possessed of such optimism, 
of such appreciation of their true worth ! 

The sordid, the melancholy and the morose, who 



HAVING A PART IN THE GAME 47 

nurse their troubles and their griefs, and finally, 
rather than suffer " the slings and arrows of out- 
rageous fortune, would take arms against a sea of 
troubles and end them, ,, are not the Mark Tapleys 
who feel it a privilege and a pleasure to bear " the 
heartaches and the thousand natural shocks that 
flesh is heir to," and reply with head thrown back, 
" I am more than an ordinary man." They are the 
criminal, the suicide, the maniac, and the world's 
failures. 

In my second day of school, seated in some 
indefinite place in my schoolroom, was MARK 
TAPLEY, and he had a habit of speaking right out 
and saying, " You had better give up. That's ordi- 
nary trouble and you are but an ordinary man. Give 
up. The ordinary teacher can't handle this job. It's 
too big for him, so you had better quit." Every- 
thing I did seemed wrong. The entire pupil atti- 
tude was bad. It was antagonistic. By and by 
Mark Tapley got on my nerves and I threw him off, 
and I stood among those children with the Dickens 
inspiration, " I am a man, and I am more than an 
ordinary man. This job is not too big for me. It 
is not big enough." When I assumed this attitude 
I became a man. I succumbed to the mental sugges- 
tion, and at once the school fell into the attitude that 
all groups of individuals fall into when they recog- 
nize that the leader has confidence in himself. 



48 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

I went about my work, earnestly trying to do 
all that was possible for me to do. I had not learned 
the art of occasioning mental activity, but in an in- 
definite, hazy manner, I attempted to get everyone 
to work. My desk was in the front of the room, 
but I, myself, was seldom there. I had to> be there 
while hearing the smaller children recite, but I ar- 
ranged " busy " work for the older pupils for those 
times. I saw to it that there were studies to be 
worked on while the primary classes were reciting. 

I have read extensively on the making of a pro- 
gram. Authorities seem to be agreed that the 
hardest subject should be given at a time when the 
pupil's efficiency is greatest. I did not believe that 
then, and I am not convinced yet that that is the 
proper way to arrange a program for a large rural 
school. My plan was to put the studies that I liked 
best just before noon, and following recess, in the 
afternoon. 

A study of discipline has shown me that troubles 
are more likely to arise at those times, and it is then 
that I wish to be at my best. If those are times when 
pupils' mental efficiency is low, it is then that their 
disposition to play is strong and their interest in 
school work is low. If I had the subjects that I 
liked best at those times, I could keep up a better 
interest than I would be able to with studies that I 
did not like. 



HAVING A PART IN THE GAME 49 

Another reason for putting these studies at this 
time was that it involved having the older pupils in 
recitation at that time to insure their keeping busy- 
up to the time of dismissal. A reason, and I have 
always considered it a defendable one, was that hav- 
ing the studies I liked best at those times insured an 
interesting closing for my school. Noon and be- 
tween four p.m. and nine a.m. are the periods for the 
forming of public sentiment or opinion. Going on 
the idea that all's well that ends well, I arranged to 
have the forenoon and afternoon sessions close well. 

In mentioning the importance of good endings, I 
had another peculiar practice which I adopted and 
followed for a number of years. I always tried to 
dress a little better on Friday than other days. I 
would like to have worn my best clothes every day, 
but since I could not afford that, I compromised by 
wearing them on Fridays and made a strong effort 
to have Friday the best day of the week. Sun- 
day being the day when the neighborhood did its 
visiting, I reasoned that on that day the school would 
come in for its share of consideration, therefore, it 
behooved me to have a good ending for the week. I 
yet believe these reasons are sound. Public opinion 
is one thing that must be carefully considered if one 
would succeed. It must not be thought that I per- 
mitted things at certain times of the day or week that 
I prohibited at other times. If I strove for one 
4 



50 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

thing more than another it was to keep my discipline 
even, or level. Unevenness is one of the sure signs 
of a poor disciplinarian. 

The attitude of my school on the second day, as 
already stated, was one of antagonism. Like the 
wild birds of Crusoe's Island, " their tameness 
frightened me." In the first place they were abso- 
lutely fearless. They had neither regard nor respect 
for school authority. Even the small children of the 
third and fourth grades seemed to feel that it was 
the proper thing to show me disrespect. 

All progressed passably well, although under a 
strain, till the last recess, when I observed the pupils 
in little groups talking and casting occasional glances 
in my direction. I scented trouble. I had been 
through too much of that kind of work as a pupil 
not to know that a storm was brewing. When I 
called school, the pupils passed me at the door, each 
one stamping as hard as he could. 

I said each one passed me stamping as hard as he 
could. As I remember, only three got past. The 
third one, Dick Holmes, a young rowdy, who 
boasted that he had helped to break up every school 
for three years, was not only arrested in his progress, 
but was thrown with such force out of the door that 
he was entirely out of the way of the rest who 
suddenly assumed an orderly and respectful manner 
and passed to their seats. 



HAVING A PART IN THE GAME 51 

Dick stood at the door in a rage, awaiting my 
next move. I bade him; enter, and when he attempted 
to go to his own seat, I told him he would occupy a 
seat further in front. I am not certain how ashamed 
I am of my feelings, but I never felt better in my life. 
I secretly hoped he would refuse to obey me so that 
we might measure forces at once. So intent was I 
upon taking care of him that I asked him rather 
mildly and with affected timidness to occupy the seat 
further to the front. The man who is in earnest is 
usually understood, and Dick seemed to understand 
all I was saying. He took the seat. 

I called the first class, but before doing so noti- 
fied them they w 7 ere about to be called, and that they 
would be asked to stand. With the word " stand " 
each one stood. I complimented them upon their 
ability to obey, and then I quietly asked them to be 
seated. I went through this procedure with every 
grade in the school, and then with all the grades to- 
gether. Then I had all but one pass from the room 
in an orderly manner and gave them ten minutes 
recess, after which I called school. They formed in 
line and each marched quietly to his seat. It was 
then half -past three, and the seven classes that came 
after recess had not recited, but each had been 
taught a lesson. I then began with class one, had 
it come orderly to place, assigned some advance 
work, and so on with all seven classes. These had all 



52 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

run the gauntlet by 3 155, and I took the remaining 
time for arranging the books in the desks and getting 
ready for an orderly dismissal. 

Through all of this drill Dick had not been 
allowed to participate. Nor was he among the boys 
who passed through the door at four o'clock. I 
am not an advocate of keeping pupils in at recess nor 
after school, but, if there is an excuse for such a 
measure, " to prevent collusion " is the most impor- 
tant one. 

To my surprise, a broom had been provided 
from somewhere, and I took up my janitor duties 
before giving attention to Dick. I had not been 
sweeping long till he began to remonstrate against 
staying in the room while I was sweeping. For a 
moment my pride almost got the better of my spirit, 
which I was trying hard to rule, but I thought twice 
and then I spoke several times and most earnestly. 
I told Dick that it had not been many years since I 
had been trying, like himself, to run the school; that 
I had as good a reputation for doing bright things 
as he had ; that my teachers had generally allowed us 
boys to ruin the school, and I had resolved to do all 
in my power to atone for my past conduct by making 
school a place where well-meaning boys and girls 
might have a chance to study ; that I did not like the 
janitor work so very well, and I surely did not like 
the dust. I told him that, on the other hand, I rather 



HAVING A PART IN THE GAME 53 

enjoyed having him there to take his share of the 
punishment. 

After I had put the room in as good order as 
was possible I gave my attention to Dick. At my 
first words he started to treat me just as a disorderly, 
bad pupil will attempt to treat a teacher, but would 
not attempt to treat anyone else. His first sentence 
caused him to be raised from his seat, and he was 
given what any teacher must give such a boy who is 
openly rebellious, when the board is not firm and will 
not take vigorous action. In this school I knew I 
would have the board with me in case I did not need 
them. That is to say, if I succeeded I would have 
their moral support, but if I needed them they would 
simply charge me with incompetency and leave me 
to drown. 

The school boards after all have a serious under- 
taking when they take sides in such matters against 
their neighbors. Hard feelings are engendered and 
these feelings have been known to outlive a genera- 
tion and seriously affect the social welfare of a com- 
munity. A board is usually very friendly toward a 
teacher who can manage a school without bringing 
it into disagreeable controversies. Corporal punish- 
ment has its bad features, and it has its good ones. 
The nagging teacher is never a good disciplinarian. 
The teacher who is deliberate and whips per previous 
announcement is usually a very poor disciplinarian. 



54 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

Dick thoroughly understood me when I told him 
that on the morrow he might feel at liberty to break 
down my authority, but that he must remember that 
I paid cash in full, and that he would need expect no 
extension of time should he become indebted to me. 
He understood that punishment would be certain and 
swift and commensurate with the offense. 

Thomas Hood's lines in " I Remember/ ' which 
run, " I remember how the sun came peeping in at 
morn, and how he never came a wink too soon," 
exactly described my frame of mind in those days. 
Nine o'clock never came too soon, especially if I had 
any " unfinished business." As stated in the first 
part of this chapter, I tried to close school with 
good feeling between teacher and pupils, but to have 
closed school feeling that some pupil had gained an 
advantage over me, would have, and sometimes did, 
mean a restless night. My plan was to balance up 
every day. 

This second day had not closed with as great a 
pleasure as some teachers might desire, but to me it 
was a joy. For two days I had been suffering from 
an awful weight. I had been given a Sunday School 
class of young men; some of them were now my 
pupils. They, without cause, except that I was to 
be the teacher, had offered me an insult that is never 
offered to any class of people but teachers. The very 
atmosphere of the school was depressing. The 



HAVING A PART IN THE GAME 55 

people were good, but their respect for teachers was 
negative. To have brought matters to an issue, to 
have had a part in the game, was indeed a satis- 
faction. 

As I went to my boarding place that evening, I 
went with a consciousness that I had been making 
rapid developments under the responsibilities that 
had come to me by virtue of the position to which I 
had been elected through the influence of my friends 
and the machinations of a county superintendent. 

A resolution was formed that evening, and it has 
been my policy ever since, and I have given it to 
hundreds of teachers who have used it with success — 
that I would begin to-morrow just where I left off 
to-day and pursue the same policy with diligence. At 
the close of the first week my policy was accepted 
by every boy in the school. There was not the 
slightest evidence of rebellion among the boys and 
they were settling down to reasonably good work, 
and I was getting into their games on a give and 
take basis. I had no feeling of restraint, nor did I 
have a desire to censure the pupils while at play. 
When school was called I felt, and this feeling was in 
no way assumed, that we were opened up for busi- 
ness, and play was to be temporarily suspended. It 
was a great temptation at times for me not to call 
for a few minutes after time in case the game was 
very exciting, but I never yielded to that temptation. 



56 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

In books there is danger of giving wrong impres- 
sions. In the foregoing recital of my second day in 
school some may get the idea that I was harsh and 
cruel. 

Once I was jokingly advising three young women 
who were about to receive their degrees and enter the 
teaching profession, that they must not forget to 
punish and punish freely. One asked me if I would 
advise whipping. I said, " Under the right circum- 
stances, I certainly advise it." " Why," she said, 
" We went to school to you twelve years and we 
never knew you to whip a pupil." 

" Well," I replied, " I guess you are right about 
that, but if the proper occasion had arisen there 
would have been corporal punishment administered 
without consideration of consequences, and it would 
have been administered at once. I was only joking 
about your punishing pupils. I want you to be kind 
to them, especially ithe little children, but I must ask 
you to be at all times absolutely in control of the 
situation." 

Some years ago a lady told me of the hard time 
she was having with the discipline of her room. 
After telling me of the very bad boys and girls, she 
said, " I never allow myself to smile. I put on a 
scowl in the morning and keep it on till the children 
have passed out at four o'clock." Can one picture 
a more desolate place than such a schoolroom? 



HAVING A PART IN THE GAME 57 

Would not a child be better oft out of school than 
surrounded by such an influence ? The teacher who 
dares not smile, aye, laugh aloud at times during the 
day, is certain to have an unfortunate schoolroom 
condition, and the children under her rule are objects 
of my sympathy. Quick, decisive action is effective. 
Careless, easy-going, threatening and never-doing 
teachers will make an orderly school an unfit place 
for children. 

A teacher who cannot discipline and retain the 
admiration and love of his pupils is a failure. If a 
teacher be worthy he should be imitated, but he must 
have likable qualities, — those which appeal to the 
young and attract them, — or his influence for their 
good will be negligible. On the other hand, if he 
be unworthy but possessed of some admirable quali- 
ties, he will be imitated. There are many capable 
teachers, and in some respects, lovable and estimable, 
whose characters wholly disqualify them as models 
for the youth. The fact that a teacher is loved and 
admired is far from proof that he is all right. As 
certainly as the weight unsupported falls to ground, 
the child becomes like what he loves and admires. 



CHAPTER VI 

Managing Girls 

There was one feature of my school work that 
was far from satisfactory, and worse yet, I did not 
see how it could be improved. I had ten or twelve 
grown young women in school, and about as many 
between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. I knew 
boys, and I knew how to control them and have them 
for my friends. I have always believed that good 
square treatment is the only kind that appeals to the 
normal boy; that he will go just as far as you allow, 
but that he soon learns his limitations. 

At the present time I feel that I know something 
about girls, but at the end of my first week of teach- 
ing I would have jumped at the opportunity of 
trading off all the girls for an equal number of boys 
without asking any questions. They appealed to 
me as not being satisfied with fair treatment. They 
wanted special privileges and seemed to think that 
they were entitled, by virtue of their sex, to these 
special privileges. It was my theory that if a certain 
act was wrong in a boy it was equally wrong in a 
girl, that if a girl did wrong she should be just as 
amenable to discipline as a boy; but on all of these 
points we seemed to differ. If one girl recited and 
58 



MANAGING GIRLS 59 

was wrong, and it fell to me to make it plain and 
right, nothing unpleasant resulted, but if girl number 
two made the correction, number one was likely 
to be out of commission for from one to three 
days. Pouting seemed to be their natural response 
to every effort that was put forth for their improve- 
ment, if this effort was not in accordance with their 
liking. With the boys it was " go and come ' as 
directed, but with the girls it was " go and come ' 
as directed when they felt that way, but when they 
did not, closed went the lips and down went the 
eyes, and closed and down they stayed till the of- 
fended one forgot her grievance, or some other girl 
took her place. That was one account that never 
balanced during the first week. In desperation, the 
first Saturday, I wrote to a lady some years my 
senior, who was principal of a good high school, to 
please write me, and write immediately, how to get 
along with girls. In one week I got her reply. It 
was satisfactory. I put it into operation, and with 
the exception of some very extreme cases her recipe 
worked. In brief her answer was as follows : 

" I never have had much trouble with girls. 
They are usually all right, and never give much 
trouble. It's the boys, they are the problems. I'll tell 
you how I get along with the boys and it's barely pos- 
sible that my plan for boys will work with your girls. 
I make it a point to have them get along with me." 



60 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

I used her formula and it worked, eventually. 

The error that I had committed was in showing 
that I was annoyed by their unfriendly attitude. I 
had gone on the assumption that they should be dis- 
ciplined, but owing to my regard for the sex I had 
expected their reaction to be somewhat different 
from what it was. 

They were quick to observe that I was annoyed 
and were quick to take advantage of my discomfiture. 

My trouble with girls for a time grew worse in- 
stead of better. I adopted the plan of requiring them 
to get along with me. It may have been an eye for 
an eye proposition, but I adopted it. Boys and girls 
who showed the right attitude received splendid 
treatment and to those who did not, I showed no 
quarter. 

With this plan in operation, troubles began to 
accumulate and before the end of the first month 
Kansas had quite a following, but strange to say she 
kept herself in the clear. On the last Friday after- 
noon of the first month Mollie McGuire, the prettiest 
and poutiest girl in the school, very abruptly cor- 
rected me on the pronunciation of a word. I had pro- 
nounced it correctly, but as there was no dictionary, 
I had no way of proving it. However, the pronun- 
ciation of the word was a minor consideration just 
then. 

There is at such times a consideration which 



MANAGING GIRLS 61 

every teacher must some time face — " Shall the 
teacher assume a personal or an objective attitude? " 

It may occur to the reader that up to this time 
I had assumed the personal attitude, but such was not 
the case. On the playground I had been but an 
individual. Outside of school I had not assumed the 
teacher attitude, but in school, I had assumed the 
teacher attitude and had made it plain that as teacher 
there were certain responsibilities that I must bear 
and that their attitude toward the teacher must be 
one of respect for those responsibilities upon which 
the good of the whole school depended. 

Mollie was promptly excused from recitation. 
Later, when another class to which she belonged was 
called, she came forward. After the class was seated 
she was again sent to her seat. 

As school for the day, the week and the month 
was about to be closed, I saw enacted an old trick. 
Mollie had all her books piled out on top of her desk. 
Mollie was quitting school. Indeed, it was not a 
new trick, for once I had done that very thing myself. 
How well I remembered it just then. My teacher 
came to me and pleaded with me not to take my 
books, and I left them, but I left them with an 
understanding that I must be treated just right or 
next time she couldn't coax me back. It was a great 
bluff. Once when we had what we thought to be an 
unusually stubborn teacher, six of us stacked our 



62 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

books and won out. Now 1 , in Mollie I had a for- 
midable foe. Her father was a board member, and 
board members' children in rural schools are prob- 
lems to be solved. Mollie was, also, quite a church 
worker. She played the organ and sang while she 
played; she was pretty and popular with all her 
schoolmates, and was therefore a most redoubtable 
enemy. 

Well, Mollie had struck, and everyone in the 
scAool was aware of the fact. Mollie had her books 
all covered with red calico. This is not important, 
but is mentioned to show how plainly I remember 
details of events that happened about twenty-five 
years ago. 

In a subsequent chapter I speak of closing 
school with a song. I think I should have sung alone 
on this memorable evening, because feeling was 
running high. 

Punishment must be certain, swift, and unerring. 
The teachei must leave no* doubt in the minds of the 
pupils as to who is the real victor, and I began early 
to show the school. It was time for closing, but I 
was timekeeper and the only timepiece there was in 
my pocket. 

I had yet some unfinished work, but I stopped 
to ask Mollie if it was her intention to quit school. 
She assured me that such was her intention, and at 
once she was granted permission to go. She went. 



MANAGING GIRLS 63 

That was many years ago, but to-day I consider 
it was good management. I never allowed a pupil 
to pass out with the school either at intermission or 
after school wiho was giving the impression that 
he was getting ahead of the school. Those are the 
times when public opinion is formed. Those are 
the times when a pupil is encouraged to do things 
that he otherwise would not do. 

Mollie left school unaided and alone. As soon as 
she had gone I began to reconstruct my school by 
arbitrarily changing the seats of all the larger girls. 
In the changing, Mollie's seat, which of course was 
a back one (a back seat is a seat of honor and is the 
one I always had), was taken by Kansas. 

If there is ever a time when a boy or group of 
boys feel clean and wholesome and want to walk 
on tiptoe just to please you it is when they feel the 
girls are getting their deserts. To the average boy 
it's the thrill of a lifetime. 

It is perfectly safe policy to pursue a route that 
leads to a certain place if you are going to that 
certain place. I had set out to effect the control of 
several very nice but badly spoiled young ladies. My 
next move was to dismiss the boys and all the small 
girls, and to the credit of all of them they went 
orderly and respectfully. 

When the girls were alone I gave them a kind 
talk without any suggestion of relenting. They 



64 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

were told in plain terms how very good they were 
as young women, and how very bad they were as 
pupils. They were told that on Monday we should 
begin all over again to pursue the same policy of de- 
manding absolute obedience, and that all girls who 
conformed to my regulations would receive the best 
of treatment and every privilege that I could con- 
sistently grant. But I held out no hope for the girl 
who pouted or who offered any but the most cour- 
teous treatment to* the teacher. 

Those days were dark and troublesome. To win 
in such an ordeal makes one respected throughout the 
community. To lose means just the opposite. 
Public opinion is a great asset when you have it in 
your favor, but after all it is an unsafe index as to 
the right or wrong of a certain cause. Public opinion 
is usually the opinion of two or three in which the 
unthinking masses concur. The wise teacher will 
try hard to control public opinion, but he should 
never allow himself to feel that public opinion is 
based upon a public conscience, for the public may 
be against you to-day and for you to-morrow. 

It is so with nations. It is so with the grand- 
stand, whether it be a national political convention 
in Chicago, a prize fight in Cuba or a bullfight in 
Juarez — the victor becomes the hero of thousands 
while the vanquished lies bleeding and alone. It was 
always that way. Cicero was driven from Rome, 



MANAGING GIRLS 65 

returned in triumph, and again with hisses and 
scourges and curses driven out, and all for naught 
but on account of public opinion. The beaten must 
not look for sympathy. Hannibal and Bonaparte, 
Calvin and Luther, politicians, financiers, prize- 
fighters, gladiators have learned or will learn of the 
fickleness of public opinion. 

Men with real convictions and courage are rare 
combinations. Sometimes such combinations make 
up parts of school boards and boards of education, 
and sometimes they do not. The smaller the school 
unit the smaller is the probability of finding the com- 
bination, and when it is wholly lacking the position 
of the teacher is far from being an enviable one. 

Every person of school experience has a teacher 
who is his ideal, and one whose advice he would rely 
upon. In my trouble I thought of my ideal teacher, 
and although it was a half-day's ride, I went to 
see him. 

My ideal teacher was the one to whom I went 
immediately after completing my rural school educa- 
tion. It was he who gave me to understand that 
nothing short of absolute obedience to the rules and 
regulations would keep me within his good graces. 
It was he who taught me that nothing was too good 
for the pupil who tried to do right. 

With this teacher as an ideal I began my first 
school. 
5 



66 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

With him for an ideal I taught my first school 
and many succeeding ones. To him I went to> give 
my experiences of my first month and receive his 
approval or disapproval. He gave me neither. 
After hearing my story, he asked, " Do you feel that 
you have done right? " I answered in the affirma- 
tive. He then said, as he pressed my hand in a. good- 
bye, " Begin Monday where you left off yesterday.' , 

I returned to my school fully believing that I 
would succeed. 

Monday morning school opened with Mollie in 
her seat. She had returned! Kansas was in the 
same seat, and again did it seem that an unpleasant- 
ness was to be met. When I went to the seat to 
make my decision, both girls stood awaiting my ver- 
dict. I said " Kansas, the seat is yours." Kansas 
replied, " Mollie may have it." Mollie, kind-hearted 
girl that she was, said, " No, it is your seat, Kansas." 

In those days seats were selected very much as 
are lands in a new country. Squatters' sovereignty ! 
Every girl who had been changed on Friday had 
been taken from a seat that was hers by preemption. 
Possibly there were " sooners " among them. 

I addressed all the girls whose seats had been 
changed. " Girls, I feel you would all like to have 
your seats again, and because of the good spirit 
shown by these two girls, I am going to ask each of 
you to take back the seat you had. In doing so I want 



MANAGING GIRLS 67 

it to be with a resolve that your whole attitude 
toward the school is to change/' 

Sometimes in months to* come we had trouble- 
some days but the fashion of unruliness among girls 
went out that morning not to return, and the teacher 
learned for the first time that girls like to be managed 
and are quite as amenable to discipline as boys, and 
like the boys they are most apt in detecting the weak- 
nesses of the opposite sex. The teacher who would 
succeed in managing either boys or girls must make it 
possible for them to get along with him. A certain 
reasonableness is necessary. 



CHAPTER VII 
Managing the School Board 

School Boards can be managed, but they cannot 
be bossed, and there is a wide difference between 
managing and bossing. No board will be bossed, 
but any self-respecting board will be managed. The 
teacher who desires to manage a board must first 
of all have well-defined plans. He must know that 
his plans have merit. The measures that he seeks to 
carry out must be for a public benefit. The teacher, 
then, who has certain well-defined, meritorious plans 
which when carried out will be a benefit to the public 
for whom he is employed is ready to interview his 
board. 

In addition to this preparation it is necessary that 
there be nothing but the best of feeling between the 
teacher and the board. School boards are, after all, 
human ; and the average human being is swayed more 
by his feelings than by his judgment. It must not be 
supposed that a school board who feels right towards 
its teacher will not be controlled by its judgment. 
In other words, the average individual will permit 
his feelings of animosity to control his actions and 
defeat good measures, but will not permit feelings 
68 



MANAGING THE SCHOOL BOARD 69 

of friendliness to influence his vote for a proposition 
which he does not believe is sound. 

The above enunciated human frailty is in evi- 
dence in all walks of life. The opposition is always 
the more active. A man's enemies will make bigger 
sacrifices to attend the election and help secure his 
defeat than will his friends to secure his election. 
The successful candidate is more likely to owe his 
election to the activity of his opponent's enemies than 
to his own popularity. 

Accepting the foregoing statements as true, it 
is proper to state that a teacher who has a good 
proposition can get favorable action on it by a board 
who are in harmony with each other and with the 
teacher provided they can be convinced that it is a 
good proposition. 

In convincing a board of the soundness of a 
proposition, there is often a lifetime prejudice to 
be broken down. Certain conditions have always 
existed so far as they know, and so far as they know 
they should continue to exist. 

A friend of the writer moved to town. He cast 
his first vote against the waterworks! and sewer 
propositions. He had always gotten along with a 
well, and it was good enough. He never had had 
running water in his house and did not believe he 
wanted it. He had always been accustomed to the 
outhouse that stood some distance from his resi- 



70 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

dence, and he did not believe two dozen such build- 
ings on the alley of the block in which he lived 
would be very bad. 

Later he voted against street paving and electric 
lights. On each proposition he was defeated, and 
each time he could see his bank account dwindling. 

In a few years the alley outhouses had been re- 
moved. The residences had running water, and the 
back yards were beautiful lawns and gardens. The 
streets, that had been beds of dust when not beds of 
mud, were macadam, and his oil lamps, relics of the 
past, were in the room with his grandmother's 
spinning wheel, the " hand " sewing machine and 
the candle moulds. 

When he had all these things, none was more 
enthusiastic over them than he. He said, " I am glad 
that I have lived to enjoy all these blessings. There 
is nothing that I have enjoyed more than my modern 
home." He took a visitor over his little citv. 
He showed him the parks, the boulevards, the 
court-house, whose bonds he had tried to defeat, and 
the new $300,000 high school building. He went 
about the exhibition of this school building in a way 
that showed perfect familiarity. 

First they inspected the heating plant and the 
ventilation system, then the boys' gymnasium with 
its swimming pool 40 x 100 feet, then the girls' 
gymnasium and swimming pool, toilets with run- 



MANAGING THE SCHOOL BOARD 71 

ning water, lavatories, mirrors and towels, the large 
manual training room, rooms for domestic science 
fitted up with every modern cooking convenience, 
domestic art, physics, chemistry and botany labora- 
tories, large well-furnished class rooms, a magnifi- 
cent library with comfortable chairs and tables, and 
last the assembly room, which had all the appear- 
ance of an up-to-date theatre. 

The old man, for he was old then, with a look 
of pride said, " It's all very nice, but it cost us tax- 
payers a lot of money; but," he added, quickly, 
" it's worth it. I never had any of these things, 
and I'm glad to be able to give them to others." 

" Do you know," said he, " that this building is 
a small concern compared with the state educational 
institutions ? We support those institutions and they 
have gymnasiums that cost as much as this entire 
building. I understand that only five out of every 
hundred who go to high schools ever attend one of 
those higher institutions. I always was in favor of 
state schools. I always believed in higher education, 
but I am afraid that I was slow in awakening to the 
needs of those Who do not get the higher education." 

He grew reminiscent; " Yes sir, I'm glad to live 
to see all this, but I'm sorry to think of many lost 
opportunities. Before I came here I was on the 
school board. I thought our school was good 
enough, but I know now it wasn't. Why, we con- 



72 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

sidered but one thing in managing our school, and 
that was keeping down the tax. 

" In hiring a teacher, the question was ' Who 
will do it the cheapest ? ' We used the cheapest mate- 
rial for blackboard that we could buy, and we bought 
the cheapest crayon on the market. If we painted the 
building it was done to preserve it, not to> make it 
more beautiful. One fall we needed more desks and 
we bought some second-hand ones that had been 
taken out of a town school to make place for adjust- 
able ones. We had no library and did not want one. 
Our teacher wanted a large dictionary one year, but 
since our school was not far advanced we got her a 
small one. t 

" When I go about the schools in this town and 
see their smooth playgrounds with their base-ball 
parks and tennis courts I am reminded of our school 
yard for whose upkeep I was responsible. We let it 
grow up in weeds during the summer and cut them 
about September first, just when they would leave 
a stubble that would ruin a good shoe, saying noth- 
ing of what it would do to bare feet. I find myself 
comparing what our home boys had, who worked 
hard and went to school but a few months every year, 
with that of the boys who attended the state schools. 
We sent but two in ten years from our district to 
college, and during all that time we were helping to 
support those schools, but we did not support our 



MANAGING THE SCHOOL BOARD 73 

own little school. Mind, I am not sorry we sup- 
ported the state schools, but I am ashamed now to 
think how we treated our home boys and girls. They 
had no gymnasium, no library, no swimming pool, 
no playground apparatus, no athletic director, and 
the schoolhouse itself was about the poorest building 
in the district. Of course, I do not put all this 
blame on myself. If I had wanted things much 
different it would have done but little good; the 
others would have outvoted me, and besides our 
district was small and the valuation low." 

The old man's confession was indicative of the 
facts that he could have been managed ; that he had 
acted according to his light; that earlier in his life 
he could have been convinced of the benefits of a 
good library, a good playground, a good school 
building ; that he could have been taught ere he had 
committed irreparable wrongs that low tax levies 
for education generally mean misappropriation of 
the people's money and the misguidance of their 
children. But these changes could not have been 
effected without some effort. I learned quite early 
that the teacher, if he would manage a board, must 
be something more than tactful. He must be persist- 
ent. On the second day of school I had made partial 
arrangements for a meeting of the board, but at the 
end of one month the meeting had not been held. 

This failure to have a meeting was no one's fault 



74 THE KUKAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

in particular. The board members lived quite a dis- 
tance apart, and they were all anxious for a meet- 
ing, but we could not meet. There was the cutting 
of prairie hay, millet and corn; the sowing of the 
fall wheat and the rye ; cattle were soon to be taken 
from the range, and corrals had to be repaired. 

There was so much that I needed that I was 
afraid to begin my enumeration. I wanted new 
desks. The ones we had were of the old double seat 
kind, whittled and scarred till the most respected 
property owner would involuntarily reach for his 
knife to further enhance their ugliness. In my later 
teaching of psychology I never fail to use those old 
desks in making concrete illustration of the " Idea 
Motor." The suggestiveness that comes from our 
environment is perhaps the greatest of educational 
factors. Environment and association determine 
our disposition, whether it be gloomy or cheerful; 
our tastes, whether they be vulgar or refined; our 
talents, whether for languages or mathematics, bad 
literature or good. 

Desks broken, ink-stained and carved! Walls, 
plaster broken, pencilled and smoked! Windows 
curtainless ; maps, globes, charts and dictionary lack- 
ing! The old stove was badly cracked, the long pipe 
sagged and was about to fall. 

The outbuildings were so bad as to make their 
description out of place. 



MANAGING THE SCHOOL BOARD 75 

The school building faced the east. The girls all 
sat on the south side of the room. The four win- 
dows on the south had neither shutter, blind nor 
shade, and when the sun was shining the girls were 
most uncomfortable, and from what I was able to 
learn, it had always been just that way. 

How could I expect young people to be good and 
clean minded, or ambitious to be other than what 
they were, with such an environment ? A noted lec- 
turer speaks of a gossiping, slanderous old woman, 
who was fairly decent and respectable when she had 
on good clothes. She would not disgrace her clothes. 
Good environment makes for good behavior. 

It is possible for us to modify our environment. 
It is possible for us to assume a hostile attitude 
toward a fixed environment, thereby modifying our 
lives, but it is unreasonable to expect such attitudes 
in the average normal child. 

Shakespeare aptly and forcefully expresses the 
belief that one may so direct his life as to change his 
real nature, in the thought where Hamlet pleads 
with his mother to refrain from certain unseemly 
and sinful acts : 

" Assume a virtue if you have it not. 
That monster custom who all sense doth eat 
Of habits, devil, is angel yet in this ; 
Refrain tonight and that shall lend an easiness 
To the next abstinence ; the next more easy, 
For use almost can change the stamp of nature." 



76 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

Thus, use may change the bad to good, and this is 
a comforting thought. On the other hand, we must, 
as guardians of child welfare, remember it works 
both ways. Goodness begets goodness, and evil 
begets evil; and if we would have children become 
good men and women with beautiful characters and 
with lofty ideals, we must surround them with the 
good and the beautiful. 

In writing of this school I offer it as a type. 
Our parents of two and three generations back have 
been pleased to point to the improvements in educa- 
tion. They have mentioned with much pride the phys- 
ical changes; the old fireplace has been supplanted 
by furnace and steam heat ; the puncheon bench, by 
the modern seat and desk. These improved condi- 
tions do exist in some favored sections, but yet the 
school of which I write is far from being an isolated 
case, even in this twentieth century, which marks the 
highest point attained in educational advancement. 
The schools that are managed or mismanaged by 
young, inexperienced, and poorly prepared teachers 
may be numbered by the thousands in almost any 
state in the union, and America's educational status 
is not second to that of any nation on earth. The 
schoolhouses that are provided in the same careless, 
thoughtless way by good men but by men too en- 
grossed with their personal affairs, and who are thor- 



MANAGING THE SCHOOL BOARD 77 

oughly incompetent to administer to the cause of edu- 
cation, are among the abundant remains of a past 
glory that has failed to keep up with the progress 1 
indicated in other great world activities. 

I had started out to boss the schoolboard but con- 
cluded to manage it, and for the accomplishing of 
this I determined to make for myself invincible 
allies, and these were the daughters of the com- 
munity. A month following the reconstruction of 
my girls I called a meeting of the older girls for 

4 P.M. 

At this meeting I made a proposition to the girls 
that I would buy the material if they would make the 
curtains for the windows on their side of the school- 
room. 

The first one to respond was Mollie. She gave it 
out plainly enough that she would help make no 
curtains, and if it had come to pass that the school 
board could not fix up the old schoolhouse, and that 
strangers had to come in and pay for things, she 
surely would quit school and stay quit. 

The daughter, who had helped me out with her 
father on the morning of the second day, and who 
was always a good girl, backed by Mollie, con- 
demned the board and their methods of not doing 
their duty, before I could interpose an objection. 
There was real rebellion threatened. This time it 



78 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

was the board who was about to be attacked, and I 
found the objective attitude easy to assume. 

I talked to those girls in a way that increased 
their activities without giving offense. It was all 
right for those girls to censure their parents, but it 
would have been ruinous to the cause had I said one 
derogatory word. 

I tried to show the girls that while the building 
was horribly out of repair, they must not censure 
their fathers. Their fathers were very busy men, 
and besides they might feel that the people in the 
district would not like for them to incur such ex- 
pense as would be necessary. This divided the 
responsibility, and each girl seemed to feel that her 
father ought to help fix up the schoolhouse. 

On the Sunday following, at the close of the 
sermon, William Constad, who' was, as he said, not 
as long on church as some of his neighbors, arose 
and asked permission to make a few remarks. 

Mr. Constad had been the object of prayers for 
years. He was the annual " stumbling block," " the 
clog in the wheels of religious progress," and his 
rising to speak caused quite a little flutter, but he 
did not keep them long in suspense. He simply an- 
nounced : " The school board will meet in this house 
to-morrow night and it wants all the men in the 
district to turn out." 



MANAGING THE SCHOOL BOARD 79 

Mr. Constad possessed a fair amount of humor 
and enjoyed, as I afterwards learned, "a little satire." 
He was fond of saying that women should not be 
allowed to vote at school meetings, that they did not 
pay taxes, and that they knew nothing about running 
schools, and therefore should stay away from such 
places as school meetings. Consequently his invita- 
tion to the men to turn out was understood by every- 
one to include the women. 



CHAPTER VIII 

The Community Meeting 

On Monday evening, "pursuant to call," the 
men of the district met with the school board, and 
with these men and school board met twenty women, 
and it was evident from the first that there was a 
unanimity of purpose among the women. But with 
the men it was different. Every man had an opinion 
and it was entirely different from anyone else's. 
One man thought the plastering should be patched, 
and another thought it should all come off and that 
a new coat should be put on. One was in favor of 
painting and another was against painting, but every- 
one believed something ought to be done. 

The meeting was called to order. The deplorable 
condition of the entire premises was thoroughly dis- 
cussed, but it was finally suggested that nothing 
could be done without money, and that the expense 
of improvement would mean an increased tax levy. 

Mr. Constad, who had expressed no opinion, 
arose and made, as he said, " a few remarks." His 
remarks ran about as follows : 

"lam getting mighty tired of this school busi- 
ness. Every year we have to pay a tax and then we 
do not get much. You men are just like me; you'll 
80 



THE COMMUNITY MEETING 81 

pay a thousand dollars for a good brood animal and 
think you are using good business sense. You come 
here and vote the lowest tax possible for running this 
school and you think that's good business sense. 

" We use this building for church, for elections 
and all other kinds of public meetings, and yet as my 
girls said to-night it's the poorest building in this 
part of the country. Half the time people call this 
school the Constad School, just because I live nearest 
to it, and I am getting tired of having my name 
stuck onto a shack that I'd tear down if it were my 
own. Now, what you have said about not having 
any money is true, and we all know why we have no 
money. We come here every year and instead of 
voting all the money we need, we vote the lowest 
amount possible. I spend more money every year 
on improvement of cattle than we all spend on edu- 
cation. We are just the same way about our church. 
We pay the lowest possible price for a preacher and 
then kick because he isn't all right. 

" This schoolhouse is going to be fixed up to look 
as well as the average house in this neighborhood, 
and the outhouses are going to be set farther apart, 
straightened up, painted outside and inside; this 
school yard is going to be fixed up to look as well 
as my feed lots, or Bill Constad is going to get off 
this board." 

This was a great speech for William Constad. 
6 



m THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

The oldest settler had never heard him say so much 
in public before. 

After his speech came that of Mr. McGuire. It 
did not require great discernment to see that Mollie 
had been bossing him. He believed all that Mr. Con- 
stad had said, but where the money was coming from 
he could not tell. 

Mrs. House, who* had been working among the 
women while the speeches were being made, had an 
idea and she begged permission to state it. Her 
idea was as follows: " I have $500, and I'll loan it 
to the school board till the next annual meeting, 
and trust to the honor of these people to make the 
levy large enough to pay me back." 

Mr. Constad arose and said : " This school board 
is borrowing no money. All who want this property 
put in shape and are willing to come out to the next 
annual meeting and make a levy to> pay for it, stand." 
Everyone but the teacher, who was simply an out- 
sider, stood. " Now," said Mr. Constad, " this board 
is going right to* work to fix up this property. We 
held a meeting this afternoon and decided upon the 
following : 

New floor. 

New desks. 

Slate blackboard. 

Teacher's desk and chair. 

Outhouses relocated, repaired and painted. 



THE COMMUNITY MEETING 83 

All plastering removed and the building re- 
plastered. 

Buildings given two coats of paint. 

New porch and steps. 

Yard graded. 

New hitch racks." 

Old man Benson showed signs of great nervous- 
ness when he arose to inquire, " What's it all going 
to cost?" 

Mr. Constad replied, " We do not know, and 
what's more, we do not care. We expect to use good 
business judgment and get a good job for the money, 
and we are going to spend enough money to get a 
good job." 

A motion to adjourn was said to be in order, but 
Mrs. McGuire, a meek little woman, interrupted that 
procedure by addressing her husband, " Andy, you 
forgot something you promised." 

" Oh, yes," said Mr. McGuire, " I forgot to men- 
tion to the board that we ought to get a big dic- 
tionary." 

" Yes," said Mr. Constad, " I was to have men- 
tioned that too, and it seems to me it's about time we 
were getting another broom." A lady in the audi- 
ence added her mite by, " Yes, and a new stove." 

The meeting adjourned and the teacher had not 
said a word, nor had he been asked to say a word, 
but he was happy because he was getting results. 



84 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

The teacher is an outsider, and there is at times the 
line which he dares not cross. He is looked upon 
as everyone's friend, no one's opponent. A teacher 
need not feel that in public matters he is discrimi- 
nated against. As a matter of fact the attitude that 
he may assume because of his position enables him 
to work the more effectively. In this case the teacher 
was accomplishing great results, and to have the 
community feel that these results were matters of 
their own doing was the greatest result of all. Polit- 
ical leaders would, but cannot, assume the impersonal 
attitude. It is the teacher's Gibraltar, and its occu- 
pancy by anyone else is an impossibility. From it he 
can, unmolested, direct the activities of the world. 



CHAPTER IX 

Repairing the School Building 

Such radical changes as had been agreed upon 
by the board, and assented to by the leading citi- 
zens, put new life into the community. While the 
contemplated changes would interfere with the 
school work, this in itself was a good thing, for it 
directed attention to the school. School over- 
shadowed all other local affairs. The improvements 
would mean for all taxpayers an additional expendi- 
ture. This gave an added importance to the indi- 
vidual, and many who had never given a passing 
thought to school matters began to feel the responsi- 
bility. All realized that an unusual thing was about 
to be done, and that it was all indicative of unparal- 
leled generosity and public spiritedness. 

In consequence of the certainty of the improve- 
ment and its accompanying expense, everyone became 
an enthusiastic supporter of education. Mr. Benson, 
who hated taxes of all kinds and would have gladly 
forfeited all their benefits if by so doing he could 
have avoided their payment, professed a deep interest 
in education and said that a tax for the support of 
the school was one that he always gladly paid. 

Tuesday morning was one of great excitement 

85 



86 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

in the school. Every pupil seemed to share in the 
responsibility. Everyone was talking of the new 
work that was about to be undertaken, and the im- 
portance of it all was nothing short of pathetic. 
Pupils who never had shown any pride in the school 
or in the community, began to discuss the relative 
greatness of their school and the surrounding 
schools. Maple Hill, Burr Oak, and Windy Ridge, 
each in its turn, suffered by comparison, and well it 
might. None of them was its equal in taxable prop- 
erty nor in school enrollment. Ours was the politi- 
cal, social and religious centre. The announcement 
of any attraction at the Constad Crossing school 
house aroused the people for miles in all directions. 
Constad Crossing was the logical and actual com- 
munity centre and all others were but as isolated 
parts. This was the real condition, but up to that 
time it had been unrecognized and unappreciated. 

In its anticipated newness all eyes were opened 
to its greatness. The beautiful valley of over twenty 
thousand acres of the richest land in the state, and 
uplands surpassed by none in the state, the beautiful 
and heavily wooded stream which divided it but gave 
it charm and beauty, were held in favorable com- 
parison with the neighbors' possessions on the north, 
east, south and west. 

There are two communities that are less in- 
fluenced by the onward march of human progress 



REPAIRING THE SCHOOL BUILDING 87 

than any others. In this age of scientific farming, 
science is slow in touching the activities of these two 
communities. These communities are the one pos- 
sessed of the richest lands and the one possessed of 
the poorest lands. 

The former has never felt the need of the friendly 
help of the U. S. Department of Agriculture and 
of agricultural colleges, because their lands yield 
bountifully and it never has occurred to them that 
it will not always be so. The latter, who live on 
the stony barren uplands, the traders, feel no in- 
terest in those things which if they possessed would 
not affect their well being. In neither of these com- 
munities is one likely to find the highest types of 
development, owing to the fact that each is lacking 
in incentives. The Constad Crossing neighborhood 
was of the former type. In an early day these people 
settled there, and without effort on their part be- 
came wealthy. Their incomes were large and their 
expenditures were small. In matters pertaining to 
the intellectual, social and spiritual they lacked per- 
sistency. They were easily aroused to action, but 
hard to keep in action. 

Indeed there is a close parallelism between rural 
schools, rural churches, and rural social life, and the 
prevailing type of agriculture. If the type is that 
which consists of garnering in the sheaves, taking 



88 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

away but never giving back, the type of religious 
practice will be the same. 

The Constad Crossing religious harvest came 
regularly, at rest periods, just before the corn husk- 
ing season and again after the corn was husked. In 
other words, their revival seasons came when there 
was nothing to interfere. I have intimated that there 
was a parallelism between their farming and their 
religious practice. They gave little attention to con- 
servation in either, but much to conversion in both. 
They relied more on converting the adult than in 
training and saving the young boys and girls, and 
this is bad practice. The farm that is robbed of its 
fertility and allowed to run to cockle burrs and other 
noxious weeds will be difficult of reclamation. With 
the boy or girl who is allowed to drift till the mind 
becomes dwarfed and evil habits are formed, recla- 
mation will be difficult and uncertain and the boy or 
girl, like the infertile, foul land, may never properly 
react to normal stimuli. 

Plans for a radical improvement of the school- 
house and premises had been agreed upon, and such 
men as composed the board, when once agreed, were 
not slow to act. Two objections to immediate action 
were offered. The regular revival season was just 
to open, and school was in session. To neither of 
these would Mr. Constad pay any attention. His 
stand on the school interference caused no particular 



REPAIRING THE SCHOOL BUILDING 89 

comment, but his interference with the meetings 
made him the object of many enthusiastic prayers 
offered in his behalf at the cottage prayer meetings, 
which were held at the homes because of being 
denied, temporarily, the use of the schoolhouse. 

However, the changes were all effected within 
one month's time and school was in session all but the 
last two weeks. 

Four weeks from the day of William Constad's 
" announcement " the building was open for " ser- 
vices." New hitch racks had been constructed along 
the north and the east. The hedge fence on the 
south and west had been taken out by the roots and 
burned and replaced with a good board fence. This 
improvement is dwelt upon because of its importance. 
The hedge in many 'ways was a nuisance, and the 
grounds, being open on the north, easily invited 
public travel across the school grounds. The hitch 
racks stopped all driving of vehicles across the 
school grounds, which had been leveled. The long 
porch extending the full length of the front had been 
replaced by a new one, and every improvement de- 
cided upon by the board had been made, including 
the broom, stove, and big dictionary. 

The morning service held under the new and 
more favorable conditions was no great success. No 
one felt at ease. The malefactors who had arbitrar- 
ily closed the doors against the revivalists were all 



90 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

there. To their credit they always sat well to the 
front and while they never took an active part they 
always gave respectful attention and financial 
support. 

The evening services were nearly as much of a 
drag as those of the morning, and were dragging to 
an uneventful close when Father Rose started up the 
hymn, " Ho, the old Time Religion, it was good 
enough for father and it's good enough for me." 
He had but fairly launched the audience into the 
third verse, " It is good enough for brother," when 
the real spirit began to work, and within an hour the 
new surroundings had lost their halo "in the light 
that never fades." 

To the teacher the use of the school building for 
other than educational purposes has been more or 
less of a problem. The average teacher is in sym- 
pathy with all movements that are for the betterment 
of the community, but he is quite likely to feel that 
his (first duty is to his job, and that the discourage- 
ment of anything that interferes with the success 
of his job lies directly in his path of duty. 

In my effecting the improvement of the school's 
physical condition I had achieved a great victory, 
but this victory was due to accident rather than to 
my good judgment. Had conditions been favorable 
to the acting upon the impulses that sent me out to 
boss the school board, failure and not success would 



REPAIRING THE SCHOOL BUILDING 91 

have attended my effort. Had I failed to gain the 
good will of the right man, nothing worth while 
would have been accomplished. 

After the improvement had been made it was my 
desire to put the school itself on a better footing than 
it had been, but the school was not the community 
interest, and o-n the reopening of school I discovered 
that it was far from being a matter of interest to the 
pupils themselves. 

Understanding the conditions, the reader need 
not be surprised that I should say that " four weeks 
from the day of William Constad's ' announcement ' 
the building was open for ' services.' " 

With the closing of the song everyone knew that 
the revival season was on, and everyone soon thought 
he knew that the teacher in the Constad school was 
opposed to everything religious and moral. This 
opinion was based upon the fact that I gave my pupils 
to understand that they could not sleep in school even 
though they had been out at church the night before, 
and that I should hold them responsible for their 
school work whether they attended church or not. 
Had I deliberately set about to alienate all of my 
friends I could have chosen no better course. The 
church people at once gave me a classification no 
teacher can afford to accept. To be considered 
against the church is certain to work disaster. In my 
dilemma I was at a loss to find an ally. Constad 



92 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

was not my man. He, himself, was not considered 
in matters affecting the community's spirituality. It 
was plainly to be seen that I could look for no support 
from Father and Mother Rose. They believed in 
me, but this belief was not to be permanent if I 
failed to give the religious movement my undivided 
support. After a very unpleasant interview with 
these two good friends, I sought advice from Mr. 
Constad, who to my surprise was as far from ap- 
proving my course as any of the others. He did not 
deny that my position was a correct one, but he 
thought it was not the only correct position. He be- 
lieved in school, but he recognized an importance in 
connection with the church which he felt I should not 
ignore, and would not ignore if I would succeed 
with my school. He favored my pursuing a con- 
servative rather than an extreme policy, and showed 
me quite plainly that the church, regardless of de- 
nomination, w!as as much an agency of civilization 
as the school, and was therefore as much entitled to 
consideration and support. 

To my discomfort he showed me that my objec- 
tion to the meetings was as much due to my estimate 
of the denomination holding the meetings as to their 
interference with the work of the school. 

Through his temperate presentation of the subject 
I was led to see that my position was not only an 
untenable one, but that it was one that might work 



REPAIRING THE SCHOOL BUILDING 93 

an injury to others than myself. The teacher above 
all others is one person who must not be considered 
as allied with those forces that are destructive to the 
best interests of society. 

Upon leaving him, I determined upon a course 
which I believed, and do believe to this day, was con- 
sistent with what was to the best interests of the 
young people under my care. 

Instead of opposing the meetings I would give 
them my support. Instead of being counted against 
the church, which I was not, I would be counted for 
it, which I was. The results were good. The minis- 
ter was quite willing to give me support. He preached 
early in the series on the importance of education. 
He showed very forcibly that good church members 
must be supporters of education. 

The meetings had been in progress but a few 
evenings before I discovered this community, like 
all communities, had problems too great for the 
school. As a teacher I was seeing educational 
problems without seeing that their solution is de- 
pendent upon the solution of certain social problems. 
I had yet to learn that the school, unaided by other 
agencies, i.e., the home and the church, can not build 
up a wholesome social life, and that these three, 
the home, school and church, are organically bound 
together and constitute the only safe basis for 
society. 



CHAPTER X 

A Rural Social Problem 

There is a rural social problem just as there is 
a city social problem. There are those who contend 
that there is a greater social problem affecting cities 
than affecting rural communities. This is not a 
question that can be definitely settled nor is it a 
question that needs to be settled. There is a rural 
social problem and it is great enough to enlist the 
attention of the sociologist. 

It is said that there is little or no pauperism in 
the rural districts ; that there are no slums and that 
social vice is unknown. 

It is true that these bad social conditions are 
not found in rural communities, but it is no less true 
that bad social conditions of the cities are worse 
because of this fact. The rural degenerate and the 
rural unfortunate for obvious reasons drift to the 
cities. The divorce evil is said to be greater in 
cities than in rural communities. The city affords 
less publicity to delinquency than does the open 
country. The city makes possible greater indepen- 
dence of one's associates, and in consequence thereof 
the city gets the refuse and the drift from its tribu- 
tary territory as surely as the main river of a system 
94 



A RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEM 95 

gets the wreckage caused by the flood devastations of 
all the rivers of the entire basin. 

There is one point that is all-important, and im- 
portant as it is, is commonly overlooked. That point 
is the absolute dependence of rural people in social 
matters. As stated above, the criminal, the pauper, 
and the unfortunate drift to the city. It is absolutely 
necessary that they shall. The human being cannot 
live unto himself. However, the rural community 
has the undesirable element, and keeps it till it reaches 
the intolerable stage. The dependence of the baser 
element is no greater than that of the better element, 
and herein is the problem. A boy and a girl may 
grow up in a city with all its evils and vices and never 
know of their existence. They may pass through 
the public schools without any personal contact with 
the vicious. The opportunity for selection is un- 
limited. The good may .find their kind just as the 
bad may find theirs — each is independent of the other 
and each is happy to be left out of the other's con- 
sideration. In the rural community an exactly oppo- 
site condition presents itself. The small number 
makes all dependent on each other and the smaller 
the unit the greater this dependency, and the greater 
is the difficulty of escaping the contaminating in- 
fluence of the evil. 

The rowdy element, of which no community, 
rural or urban, is entirely free, is less restrained in 



96 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

the outlying rural communities. There are several 
reasons for this, but the greatest is that of depend- 
ency. The sober, steady-going, self-respecting ele- 
ment, while disapproving, dare not ignore the fact 
that those who live in their midst and wlx> are capable 
of doing them serious injury must not be offended. 
This point is well illustrated in a case occurring dur- 
ing this same year but in another neighborhood. 

The teacher was at the head of what would be 
called to-day a community welfare league. He ar- 
ranged literary programs and upon certain occasions 
read popular lectures to his audiences. These were 
especially enjoyed by a great majority of his audi- 
ences, but there was that rowdy, lawless element 
whose ideals and thoughts were low. This element, 
though small, began to disturb the meetings with the 
avowed purpose of breaking them up. In a city these 
toughs would have been summarily fined or jailed, 
probably both, but here they operated unopposed ex- 
cept by the teacher, who after a most serious affront 
had several parties arrested, and as he expressed it 
later, he himself was almost convicted. 

This must not be interpreted to mean that moral 
courage is more lacking in rural than in urban com- 
munities. It is a condition surrounded with respon- 
sibilities that are most grave, but there is an organi- 
zation which as a moralizing influence cannot be 
overestimated. It, like its sister organization of the 



A RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEM 97 

city, may be short in its proper activities, but it is 
absolutely the most essential organization for the 
protection of society. By city writers it is criticised 
as being inefficient, but without it life would be in- 
tolerable. It is superfluous to tell the reader that 
this organization is the rural church. Wherever it 
is in evidence, in the lowlands of Arkansas, or in the 
mountains of Montana, the foothills of the Blue 
Ridge Mountains or the prairies of Western Kansas 
and Eastern Colorado, man is reasonably secure in 
person and property. 

Occasionally the rural church, like the rural 
school, gets jobs of too great an undertaking; some- 
times the rowdy element is too strong and the min- 
ister is too weak, and then results are very bad 
indeed. 

Soon after the revival started, trouble from the 
rough element began. (I must warn my reader not 
to associate too closely this crowd with the Constad 
Crossing neighborhood.) They came from miles 
around. Drinking and carousing were not uncom- 
mon in those early days of attempted prohibition, 
and they were much in evidence at many public 
gatherings, and very much in evidence at those meet- 
ings where good men and women were gathered to 
rescue and to save. Young men of great strength 
of body but weak in morals visited those meetings. 
7 



98 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

They came drinking and cursing, defying both God 
and man. 

The average individual likes attention, and these 
fellows prided themselves on their toughness, glory- 
ing in it because it brought them up for prayerful 
consideration. The louder the prayers, the louder 
the profanity, because it meant louder-yet prayers. 
After an unusually rough evening the minister an- 
nounced that on the following evening he was going 
to fight the devil with fire. " To-morrow evening 
I propose to begin ' backfiring/ " he announced. 
After church he called to one side a young man of 
powerful build and engaged him in conversation. 
The young man was Jack Graham. Jack was a 
decent young man. He was steady-going but he was 
not religious. Just decent, and honest, and hard- 
working, and good-natured. The minister said, 
" Jack, I need you. I feel that I must have your 
help or these meetings will fail." 

Jack said, " I have told you I won't pray, and I 
can't sing. If you ever ask me again to come to 
that mourners' bench, I'll never come again to hear 
you preach." " No, Jack," said the minister, ' I 
do not want you to pray, I do not want you to sing, 
I do not want you to come to the mourners' bench, 
but Jack, when we are singing to-morrow evening, 
and when we are praying, and when we are at the 
mourners' bench, I want you to be as far from the 



A RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEM 99 

mourners' bench as you can get and still be in the 
house. I want you to be my fire with which to fight 
the devil. Get right among those poor drunken 
sinners and get them to keep quiet — so they can hear 
the singing and the praying, and the confessions of 
the penitent. You keep order, Jack, and the rest of 
us will do the praying and the singing. Do this, 
Jack. I wish you could pray, Jack. You would be 
a power if you could." 

Jack quietly answered, " I would just as soon be 
fire one night or so, but I won't pray." 

The following evening bid fair to furnish con- 
siderable entertainment. The devil had been work- 
ing pretty hard, and to just a casual observer it 
would appear that he was considerably in the lead. 

Old Sim Nay son, the vilest of men, had pro- 
fessed conversion the previous winter. He was 
without decent clothes, and Father Rose fitted him 
out in good clothes, even to overshoes and overcoat, 
and after he had fed him he gave him a Bible. 
Within twenty- four hours after being outfitted he 
was staggering drunk and bragging of what religion 
had done for him. It had clothed him and fed him, 
and he recommended it to his friends. He had the 
effrontery to publicly boast that the present meet- 
ings would bring him another suit of clothes. As 
to the Bible, the one he got last year was as good as 
new. To his idle listeners he was great amusement. 



100 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

The meetings had not been well started before old 
Sim began to lay his plans for new clothes. He 
went regularly to the mourners' bench, but as he 
expressed it, he always got on the end where there 
was no business, and consequently received no 
special mention in prayers. 

The meeting as usual opened with singing, and 
the house was crowded to the door. Curiosity 
seemed to have had a quieting effect — the toughs 
were all there but in the earlier part of the meeting 
were more quiet than usual. 

The song service was followed by a sermon 
which was a strong appeal. The minister was so 
much in earnest that it seemed that none would be 
so hardened as not to be touched. The sermon was 
followed by the usual invitation to the mourners' 
bench, and on first call Mr. Sim Nayson went 
forward. 

This was a signal for the rowdies, and during a 
song Manly Wixon, a large, rawboned, red-whis- 
kered, red- faced tough of about twenty-five years, 
began to swear and create a disturbance. Then the 
back-firing started. 

Jack went quietly to him, laid his hands on his 
shoulder and said, " The minister wants to have your 
soul saved, Manly Wixon, but I don't. I think you 
ought to go to hell soul and body ; if you make the 
least disturbance I am going to knock you through 



A RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEM 101 

that window. Now, Manly, do not take this to mean 
that I want you to keep quiet. I want you to make a 
noise ; I want you to swear so they can all hear you, 
and when they look around, they all will get to see 
you smashing through the window." 

It was very quiet now in the rowdy corner. 
Everybody knew Jack, and they knew he never 
promised anything which he did not do. 

Such methods of gaining the attention of one's 
audience will hardly meet with the approval of some 
modern disciplinarians. To resort to such tactics 
was an acknowledgment of that minister's weakness. 
It was a direct resort to brute force. Men are not 
won in that way. To compel obedience is not to 
touch the heart, and the individual is the same after- 
wards as before. Maybe so. Maybe so. Manly 
Wixon was a bad man. His influence was for the 
very worst. He had a good mind but he used it 
for purposes most vile. Manly Wixon, relieved of 
the necessity and of even an opportunity of putting 
on a show, began to look around, and later to give 
his attention to the meeting which was progressing 
under the newly favorable conditions. 

The last call for sinners was sent out, and to the 
surprise and joy of everyone, ugly, rawboned, red- 
faced Manly Wixon started to the mourners' bench. 
Down beside the whisky-soaked young man, who 
but a brief hour before was cursing in his anger 



102 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

" the sniffling hypocrites," knelt his gray-haired, 
praying mother. At his other side knelt his saintly 
old father, and at the end of those prayers, Manly 
Wixon arose — a man. Manly Wixon has stood the 
test of time. Since that night he has not only led 
an upright life, and borne a good reputation among 
his fellowmen, but he has worked his way through 
college and has preached the gospel and has been a 
power for good in the church. 

" Old Jack," as he was lovingly called, couldn't 
sing and wouldn't pray, but he stood for decency, 
and had his reward, for he himself became the object 
of Manly Wixon's affections, and later walked in 
his footsteps. But how about Simeon Nayson ! On 
this night he knelt unattended and unprayed. Not 
unprayed entirely, either. Just at the close of this 
eventful night, — the night when they back-fired on 
the devil, — when all was still, and the benediction was 
about to be pronounced, the minister passed to the 
kneeling Sim — Sim, who had boasted of the great 
benefits of an every-day religion — whole suit, and 
cap, overcoat and shoes, plus a Holy Bible. 

The minister laid his hand on Simeon's head and 
in clear tones pronounced the following, which 
sounded like a malediction : 

" Oh, Lord, Thou knowest if this man be in earnest. 
If he be, Oh, Lord, bless him. 
If not, smite him. Amen. 



A RURAL SOCIAL PROBLEM 103 

The work of the rural church is peculiar in the 
sense that every efficient organization must be pecu- 
liar — it must meet conditions as they are found. The 
rural church to be efficient must, in its own way, do 
its particular work. It would be as great a mistake 
to try to " citify " a rural church as it would be to try 
to " ruralize " a city school. Each must render ser- 
vice to its own constituency and by its own peculiar 
methods. 



CHAPTER XI 

Managing Boys 

Generally considered, boys make the real 
problems of discipline. In the Crossing School the 
boy problem was an ever-present one, due to several 
causes. 

Probably the first which presented itself was 
that caused by irregular entrance to school. The 
new boy always seemed to feel the obligation of 
affording a certain amount of entertainment to the 
school, and the boys who were already in school, 
in turn felt impelled to show the newcomer their 
accomplishments, which usually involved " a put- 
ting " of a few things " over ' ' on the teacher. In 
one or two instances, notably one, the late arrival 
had been somewhat notorious for his misdoings in 
the school of former years. Since reformation is 
not looked upon by a boy in the teens as being a par- 
ticularly manly undertaking, he was expected by 
all, and by himself especially, to live up to the 
enviable reputation already established. 

There is nothing more unfortunate that can come 

into the life of a large overgrown boy than to have 

him acquire the reputation for being tough. He is 

certain to live up to that reputation. The compelling 

104 



MANAGING BOYS 105 

forces are so great that he can't resist them. He 
hears of his greatness everywhere. Sometimes he 
is admonished, but usually the admonition is ad- 
ministered in such a way as to urge him on and 
frequently with the express design of urging him on. 

My ability as disciplinarian was always men- 
tioned with " But Sam Morris has not started yet. 
Sam says school will last but three days after he 
starts. He expects to enter school on a Wednesday 
so as not to cause any loss of time on the teacher's 
part. He will make it even time." 

The teachers in city schools, who have superin- 
tendents, backed by boards of education, who in 
turn are backed by the police, may look lightly upon 
such cases as the rural teacher has to face — face 
squarely too* ; but such teachers have not had the real 
experience. A man or woman can live a lifetime in 
almost any other vocation without meeting a propo- 
sition more trying. 

To begin with, the teacher is a non-resident. To 
close with, the community is composed of residents, 
and they want to live peaceably among themselves, 
and very often the feeling is that the teacher is re- 
ceiving much more than the common laborer, and if 
he can't handle his job without outside help, he 
should let someone else try it. 

It is not altogether unreasonable that neighbors 
in rural districts should cultivate each other's friend- 



106 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

ship more than do people in the towns and cities. 
The farmer is the most dependent person, socially 
speaking, in the world. He cannot change his resi- 
dence if he does not like his.neighbors. He must live 
where his business is and he must live in peace, or 
life is not worth living. 

Many of the most intolerable social conditions 
in the state have grown out of school troubles* Ex- 
cept the line fence trouble, school trouble is second 
to none, and over it many lives have been lost, and 
in the immediate neighborhood of which I write the 
line fence had but a few months before exacted its 
death toll, and within twelve months an adjoining 
neighborhood had paid the price in human life of re- 
ligious excitement. 

With these conditions, with which I was already 
quite familiar, the approach of the day when the 
self -announced adversary of public schools was to 
enroll was looked forward to with no very noticeable 
enjoyment on my part. 

He came, and as announced, he came on Wednes- 
day. He had all the marks of a bully, and he showed 
his bluff in every movement. He swaggered, he 
talked loud, he threw his overcoat over his shoulders, 
presumably for the purpose of clearing for action. 
He chewed tobacco, and he did a good job of it. 
He had other frailties, but you have heard enough. 
The school, which had settled down to good behavior 



MANAGING BOYS 107 

and good feeling, was deeply impressed with Sam's 
arrival. The girls were plainly against him, but the 
boys scented a fight, and of course there was but 
one opinion as to its outcome and, therefore, the 
popularity of the one destined to defeat grew less 
as the one who was to win grew greater. With 
his increasing popularity he grew more insolent. 
This was in a measure encouraging, for every bad 
movement would justify the repulse that he would 
be given when the time for action arrived. 

To the inexperienced teacher the foregoing re- 
marks may need explanation. 

The pupil bent on creating a disturbance works 
carefully for an opening. He does nothing directly. 
He possesses the foresight of the outlaw, and plans 
his attack in a way that makes detection difficult and 
escape possible. He works the ''offensive " just 
enough to make the position " defensive " easy to 
assume. He walks heavily enough to< annoy the 
school, but not so heavily as to make a sure case 
against him. He drops his books, making a loud 
noise, but leaving insufficient proof of his intention 
to justify a reprimand. He coughs so loudly as to 
attract attention of the whole school and the school 
laughs. But they should not laugh, for he says he 
has a very bad cold, and it can't be proved that he 
has not a very bad cold. Every act is studied. He 
knows full well that he is safe so long as an abso- 



108 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

lute case cannot be made against him. The teacher 
may remonstrate with him for his heavy walking, 
for his careless handling of his books and for his 
loud coughing, and by that time the teacher, of 
course, is picking on him and " nagging " him. In- 
stead of having a case against the pupil, the pupil 
has a case against the teacher; and public opinion, 
the most delicate and most unreliable thing on earth, 
turns to the culprit, and puts the " offending ' 
teacher on the defensive. When it becomes neces- 
sary for a teacher to defend his position, he must 
have a preponderance of evidence or the jury, which 
is composed of resident citizens, will find for the 
plaintiff. 

Therefore, it becomes necessary for the teacher 
who faces the expert criminal to bide his time. The 
term outlaw and criminal are used advisedly. True, 
such pupils are as yet embryonic, but unless checked 
they are doomed for a career that eventually leads 
to the prison cell. Acquaintance with the history of 
the vicious convicts supports the belief that vicious 
men were not model pupils, but on the contrary were 
rebellious and difficult to control. In company with 
a delegation of teachers, a few years ago, I 
visited a state penitentiary. More than one of our 
delegation called for prisoners who had at one 
time been their pupils. Some were life prisoners. 
No longer did these men swagger and leer and show 



MANAGING BOYS 109 

by every movement that they were victors. They 
came into the warden's office, pale, dejected, heart- 
broken men. There were many tears and childlike 
sobs. They were truly penitent, but it was a tardy 
penitence. Without exception they spoke of their 
school days — of the trouble they made. Oh, if they 
could only have a boy's chance once more! How 
different their lives would be! 

A sight like this calls most loudly to the teacher 
to weigh carefully his responsibility. Somewhere 
there had been poor management and very bad dis- 
cipline. Through negligence or ignorance on the part 
of parent or teacher, or parent and teacher, there was 
failure to inculcate effective ideals of respect for 
authority and law. This respect must be engendered 
or the coming generations will pay the penalty. A 
school uncontrolled is a kindergarten for reforma- 
tories and prisons, and weak sentimentalism is as 
much out of place in the teacher and as ineffective 
as a disciplinary measure as is faint-heartedness in 
a surgeon. The teacher is under as great an obliga- 
tion to save the youth to a moral life as is the surgeon 
to save to a physical life, and failure through wilful 
neglect or inexcusable ignorance in the teacher or in 
the surgeon merits severe condemnation, and should 
be a bar against future practice. 

For two days Sam exercised all his arts to disturb 
the school without stepping over the line. Just be- 



110 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

fore noon on the third day he made a very poor 
recitation, which I believed was intentional. There 
were others in the class that did not do well and it 
was very evident that they were in an alliance with 
the teacher's foe. They were all asked to return to 
the room after a half hour's intermission and study 
the lesson. 

As anticipated, Sam remained outside till school 
was called. 

There was a crisis. The teacher who meets a 
situation like this must decide upon one of two 
courses : allow the offense to go unnoticed or admin- 
ister proper punishment. As to what that punish- 
ment is, he alone must decide. To allow the offense 
to pass unnoticed means but one thing, and that is 
failure. 

The latter of the two courses was chosen, and as 
well as I remember, the following is the account of 
my first real experience in handling a difficult ques- 
tion, and for it years have brought no regret. Pro- 
grams should be carefully followed, but regular busi- 
ness should always be suspended in the interests of 
public safety. How teachers or parents can continue 
the even tenor of their ways when a child needs 
immediate relief is as incomprehensible as why a 
locomotive engineer would drive his engine after he 
knows there is something vitally wrong. 

When the school was seated and perfectly quiet, 



MANAGING BOYS 111 

the pupil who had broken up schools in previous 
years, and who was avowedly there at this time on a 
similar errand, was asked to come to the front. 

This was a hard situation in which to place a 
young man of such fame. The eyes of seventy 
pupils were on him. There was an expectant com- 
munity waiting the returns. He was now to be 
weighed. Would he be found wanting ? By an un- 
controllable instinct, fear, which sooner or later 
victimizes the moral delinquent, he was driven from 
his position and stood before his neighbors awaiting 
his teacher's further will and pleasure. 

The teacher's attitude was now wholly imper- 
sonal. Had it been otherwise forgiveness could 
have been pronounced, but the great lesson that the 
boy needed to have was incomplete. He had offended 
society and the penalty must be paid. With his eyes 
downcast he heard the following, so nearly as can 
be recalled: 

" Sam, are you aware of the fact that to anyone 
who knows boys or men, you are very much of a 
coward? You are a coward from every point of 
view. In the first place you are a coward because 
you are putting up a bluff on me. You have not 
thought for a minute that there would be any physi- 
cal encounter between you and the teacher. You 
made your bluff work last year and that was your 
ruin. If your teacher had given you what he was 



112 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

well able to do and what any able-bodied man in the 
neighborhood would give you, were you to offer him 
any such insults as you offer the school, you would 
have been a pretty decent sort of a fellow. In the 
last place you are a coward, because you, without 
reason, allow people to cause you to mistreat a per- 
son against whom you have no< really bad feeling. 
You may have some manhood left, but it's covered 
up in conceit and cowardice. In addition to your 
conceit and cowardice you are a most foolish person. 
You have made threats against an innocent person, 
one who has the interests of the community at heart. 
If your teacher then did not administer to you a 
sound thrashing, as he now intends to do, he would 
turn you over to the sheriff of the county and what 
you or this particular neighborhood might think 
would make no difference. All who feel they want to 
see Sam thrashed for his assault on the Crossing 
School will remain in the room. Those who do not 
may pass out and remain till the ringing of the bell." 

The girls without exception rose and passed out. 
The boys, governed more by principle than feelings, 
followed the girls, and Sam and the teacher with a 
thoroughly good whip burned the mortgage that 
Sam had put on the Crossing School the year before. 

Sam was asked to make no promises. He had 
paid the debt and without further ceremony was 
restored to citizenship. 



MANAGING BOYS 113 

Sam never caused any more trouble. It was a 
hard struggle. He had much to face. He had a 
community who took delight in teasing him whom 
before they had honored. But he came out of it, 
and while he never showed any great strength of 
character, he became in after years a safe citizen. 

We often speak of certain diseases — that the 
parties did not inherit them, but rather a weakness 
in which these diseases found easy competition. So 
do we find in the moral health of the boy certain 
inherited tendencies which make him more easily 
controlled by certain forces than is some other boy. 
It is most important that we accept these so-called 
tendencies. They are innate, but like the physical 
they may be corrected or they may be made the basis 
for moral degeneration. It is not my purpose to 
point out the weaknesses of the boy and how they 
may be corrected. I shall, however, consider him as 
we find him and as we treat him, leaving my reader 
to judge if the treatment that the boy receives be not 
usually administered with a lack of common sense 
and if it be not a mighty force in determining his 
destiny. In my opinion one of the most ruinous 
forces is the erroneous prevailing opinion of what a 
boy is. 

I am sometimes asked : " Why do you emphasize 
the boy ? Why not the girl ? Why do you not speak 
of the forces that control the girl, or rather the child ? 
8 



114 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

Are the influences or forces that control the boy dif- 
ferent from those controlling the girl? Or is boy- 
nature different from girl nature, and, therefore, are 
different forces necessary for its control ? ' 

Possibly those forces which tend to draw the 
child downward find a greater affinity in the char- 
acter of the boy than in the girl. Possibly, too, the 
girl nature, or girl character, is more susceptible to 
those higher, ennobling and refining influences or 
forces than is boy nature or character. Be this latter 
speculation true or not, I would not venture to say, 
nor even presume to think, yet something says such 
is the universally accepted opinion. Now if this be 
an opinion that is generally accepted, foolishly 
maybe, is it not a mighty force? Aye, and if it be 
frequently expressed might not these expressions 
themselves prove controlling forces to the detriment 
of the boy ? 

The mischievous boy baby is often indulged by 
the fond parent because his little naughtinesses, while 
bad in themselves, are just like a boy. As the boy be- 
comes a little older, his meannesses or Eve tendencies 
are looked upon with much the same leniency and 
passed over with the same old observation, " That is 
just like a boy." By and by this boy becomes a 
school boy. The boy who was immortalized by 
Whittier at once loses caste, and as truly to-day as 
when Isaac was a boy, is he made the burnt offering 



MANAGING BOYS 115 

if nothing better is at hand. He is (idiotic as it may- 
seem) early informed that he must be good. He is 
at once made to feel that his very presence is offen- 
sive, and that he is not often, good, and with the 
birds of a feather idea, he assembles himself slowly 
but surely, degree by degree, with that group of sup- 
pressed individuals who have learned by experience 
that " It's not theirs to make reply." Do you won- 
der if such a force bearing down upon a little fellow 
may not shape and determine his destiny ? Charles 
Dickens thought these forces most potent. Let me 
pause long enough to say that the boys ought to 
build a monument to the memory of Dickens. He 
himself has been a mighty force among the forces 
that affect the boy life, especially in this regard. A 
few years ago it was thought that this king of prose 
writers would soon be unread, but there are more 
copies of his works being sold at this time than ever 
before. He stands to-day as the greatest factor in 
educational reform that the English speaking nations 
have produced. 

The life of a schoolboy — it is most solemn to 
contemplate. I never see the boy entering school 
for the first time but I have a feeling that is akin to 
sorrow. Good, pure, innocent, trusting, confiding 
little cherub — so soon to step upon the stage and 
play the part assigned him. 

Edwin Booth, the greatest American actor, 



116 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

played Hamlet so long and so well, he feigned mad- 
ness so admirably, that in the last years of his life 
attendants had to exercise the greatest diligence to 
prevent a real tragedy when he stabbed Polonius. 
The boy becomes an actor. In the dramatis persons 
he is the Boy. He is no one's darling any more. 
He is just one of the boys. A boy is rough, he 
must be rough, or he is a girl-boy. He must not 
be dainty; that would be affectation. He must not 
be, he cannot be, modest; that in a boy is unpardon- 
able. That is bashfulness. Amid all this, time 
passes on and the- boy, while no one censures or 
particularly cares or blames him or holds him ac- 
countable, naturally gets a little older, a little more 
awkward, and considerably self-conscious, and in 
this period nonsensical courses of vigorous treat- 
ment are prescribed. He is subjected to lectures 
(morals, hygienic) upon the not doing of the identi- 
cal things which the forces have compelled him to 
do. He is brought face to face with facts — that 
he is untouth, unkind ; that he is not gentle with his 
sister or respectful to his mother; that his father, 
the monument of force, is his only control, that cor- 
poral force by which he cam be swayed is the only 
one to be resorted to to control his natural perverse- 
ness of character. 

At about this time the attempt is made to un- 
teach him all that he has been taught. But he has 



MANAGING BOYS 117 

played the part and it is now a reality. He is bidden 
to pay a thousand little compliments to his sister and 
to other girls and other ladies and he wonders why 
no one ever tells them anything nice to do for him. 
He wonders why girls are so much better, so much 
nicer than he. He knows they must be. He is 
always told they are. He has read about bad boys, 
but never in all his life has he ever heard or read 
of a naughty, bad girl. He has read that old story 
about the boy that threw the snowball against the 
schoolhouse door. He has heard that once popular 
ditty, " What are little girls made of? Sugar and 
spice and everything nice, that is what little girls are 
made of. And what are little boys made of? To- 
bacco and snuff and all such stuff, and that's what 
little boys are made of." 

What fools, what fools we mortals be ! What is 
the forecast with all these forces driving him and 
pushing him along? Will the father be happy in 
the realization of his hopes? The daughter so 
gentle, so loving! She stays at home. Her brother 
cares nothing for her now. She wonders, " What 
use are brothers, anyway ? " And well she may after 
the forces have done their work. These have long 
since convinced him that he and she have nothing in 
common. That he is not a fit companion for his 
more refined sister, he never doubts. Why, ever 
since she was a little girl and he was a little boy, 



118 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

their ways have been different. Pretty curls — dirty 
face, new shoesi — chapped feet, kisses— frowns, 
mamma's pet — mamma's heart-ache. Thus the 
forces have driven them apart. At church, the sister 
up in the front or in the choir, the boy in the back 
seat or down town. Conditions, like the boy, change. 
New conditions enlist new forces. Sisters need es- 
corts. The controlling forces make it proper, and 
the boy for the first time since he donned trousers 
is induced to accompany his sister to places of en- 
tertainment. Methinks the lad is secretly proud that 
his sister should condescend to accept such company 
as his, and in a very short time hereafter this boy 
who has been the cloud on the family horizon, the 
menace to society, the bugaboo to little children, be- 
comes just like a man. Indeed, he is called a man, 
and he is becoming cognizant of the new responsibil- 
ities which the new forces are controlling and his 
destiny begins to assume calculable proportions. 
The new world into which he is being initiated 
contains forces which he is slow to understand. 
Eventually the mystery is solved, the darkness in 
which he has wandered since he was not mamma's 
baby vanishes and rapturously he exclaims: 

" Oh, woman, lovely woman, 
Nature made you to temper man. 
We had been brutes without thee. 
There's in you all that we expect of heaven, 
Amazing brightness, truth and everlasting joy." 



MANAGING BOYS 119 

So it is of the forces that control thes finer 
emotions. The boy is deprived of them until his 
nature has become hardened, and when it is too late 
he is reclaimed in form, and for the remainder of his 
life he is the staunch advocate of the doctrine of 
the immoral agency of boys, and thus is another 
if not a new force for the destruction of boys 
created. The common sense used in controlling the 
girl will control the boy. Pretty stories, nice toys, 
clean faces, nicely combed hair, nice clothes, caresses 
and kind words and social recognition are as power- 
ful controlling forces in the boy as in the girl ; and 
the forces that demoralize the boy would equally 
demoralize the girl if applied. 

The boy if sensibly treated is as responsive as 
is the clay in the hand of the potter. He is par- 
ticularly sensitive on one point, and I would warn 
all who do not understand the boy not to assume 
that because he is so docile you can impose on him. 
Punish him ever so severely and if he deserves it 
he is yet your faithful friend, but convincing him 
of your superiority by domineering and tyrannizing 
over him will create a passion that would destroy 
the oppressor and the oppressor's soul. 

Boys are just as refractory as girls and like them 
they sometimes need heroic treatment, and like them 
thrive under its proper administration. Reciprocity 
treaties with the boys will work wonders. The 



120 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

meanest boy in your town would walk a block for 
the privilege of lifting his hat to a lady if he be- 
lieved that she appreciated the act. Benjamin 
Franklin was not sorry that he turned the grind- 
stone, though his hands burned and pained ; but the 
flame of indignation kindled by " Scud to school, 
you little rascal " never quite died out. The forces 
that control the boy are those which appeal to his 
heart, his pride and his sense. 

I would not have it understood that Lam partial 
to the boy nor would I have it understood that I 
think the girl is better treated than she should be. 
In fact I do not think she is too well treated. I 
do think that she is more sensibly and carefully 
treated than the boy, and it is for a more careful 
and sensible treatment of the boy that I would plead. 
The treatment that the boy is to receive in the 
future years is going to be a great improvement over 
that of the past, and I believe we shall grow a better 
boy than the world has ever known. Indeed, I am 
of the belief that notwithstanding the many frail- 
ties and shortcomings of the boy of to-day, he is 
the best boy, the cleanest boy, the manliest boy that 
ever inhabited this world. He is the result of the 
new education. He will be the result of common 
sense didactics. True, the world has a few of us 
left who are of that school which believes that the 
activity of youth is degeneracy, who believe that it 



MANAGING BOYS 121 

is the mission of the adult population to curb and 
subdue the youth of the land, who say that the boy 
of to-day is worse than the boy when we were boys. 
We who think such thoughts are honest in our 
thinking, but very ignorant of the past or what 
would be a kinder criticism, very forgetful. The 
boys of past generations, as their own biographies 
will testify, were not models from certain points of 
view. Irving says, '"The boy whose passions are not 
strong enough in youth to mislead him from the 
path of science which his tutors and not himself 
have marked out for him, will probably obtain every 
advantage and honor that his college can bestow, 
but the man whose youth has been thus passed in 
the tranquillity of dispassionate prudence is like 
liquors that never ferment and consequently are 
always muddy." I do believe that the school of to- 
day and the intelligent home of to-day are taking a 
better and more sensible view of the matter and 
have about concluded that nature is deserving of a 
more liberal patronage than she has been accustomed 
to receive. And while, as one of our prominent 
educators has said, " When we leave the town of 
Boyville we may never return, yet we may be per- 
mitted to peer over its walls and see the place where 
we once did live, and in our peering we may recall 
the desires, the inability to gratify them, the disap- 
pointments, the sorrows, which were greater than 



122 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

any we have encountered in later life, and in our 
legislating for that younger colony let us not fail to 
remember the very kind of legislation that would 
have been best suited to us when we lived there, and 
give it to them. ,, 

This is not dangerous advice. The youths that 
are ruined by over-indulgence are small in number 
when compared with the number of those who have 
been ruined by withholding the things which, in- 
nocent in themselves, would have been enjoyments in 
that age when such enjoyments only come, and by 
withholding the things which youth requires, and by 
forcing upon it what it does not want and often 
should not have. Youth is not the time to prepare 
for old age, so much as it is the time when the 
most should be gotten out of life, the time when 
beautiful characters should be formed, not for the 
future but for the present. What man or woman 
past middle age can think that youth is the prepara- 
tion for old age? Youth is for development, for 
joyful, happy times, and useful times. Take care of 
youth and old age will take care of itself. 

I plead not for a loose discipline but for a most 
careful, watchful supervision. The miseries of per- 
dition are no less to be shunned than the miseries of 
the prodigal youth, whether boy or girl. The parent 
or teacher who is ignorant of the pitfalls is unfitted 
to lead. The parent or teacher who employs a 



MANAGING BOYS 123 

negative discipline or repression, depression and op- 
pression, retards and arrests development. Such 
discipline, however, is most common, because it is 
easier to destroy than to invent; to> tear down than 
to build up. 

We must ever keep in mind that the child be- 
comes what he likes. If we would have vice shunned 
we must make goodness attractive. If we would 
have our followers pure, we, the leaders, must be 
pure. We must remember the influence of en- 
vironment and provide proper associations and 
proper entertainment. And this means much prepa- 
ration and hard work. 

One of the greatest troubles of humanity is over- 
seriousness. We magnify responsibility. We know 
so much of the seamy side of life and so little of the 
seamless side. We see nothing but seams. We 
forget to look on the other side. We see so much of 
the bad and so little of the good. With young men 
and women there is much of the good and little of 
the bad. In this twentieth century we have a young 
woman who is the greatest creation, with one ex- 
ception, that ever came from the hand of God, and 
that exception is the twentieth century young man. 
He is great in spite of the conditions. I say this 
without expecting favor from the young men, but 
for the influence it may have on those who think the 
boy is by nature bad. I make these statements to 



124 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

my readers, hoping to awaken feelings of responsi- 
bility. I have had many years' experience with 
boys. Before I began my work as a teacher I made 
this resolution : Every boy who comes under my care 
will receive as much care as will the girl. If he is 
deserving commendation he will always get it. No 
boy will ever receive any but the kindest treatment, 
even though he be awkward, overgrown and green. 
He may swear and do a thousand uncomplimentary 
things, but I'll treat him fair and square. I'll be 
honest with him, I'll bend him but never break him. 
If he breaks confidence with me I'll wipe off the slate 
and begin anew — open a new account. I'll always 
remember the lad I once was. I'll give him the 
love I used to want and did not get. I'll try 
to forget all the bad he does and try to remember 
all the good, and I'll always try to remember that 
there is more good in a bad boy than there is in a 
good man. 

After over twenty-five years of acting upon these 
resolves I stand ready to approve of them. Such a 
policy will make honorable men out of any type. 
It will win in the slums of the great city as it will 
win upon the beautiful prairies. 



CHAPTER XII 

A Teacher's Responsibility as Seen by 
A Board Member 

In every community there are men who bear 
good names but do not deserve them. They are 
loud in their professions of goodness, but at heart 
they are bad. 

In every community with which the writer is 
familiar there is at least one man who' is better than 
he is given credit for being. These men have pecu- 
liar notions of letting their light shine. They abhor 
anything that has the faintest of show in it. They 
are of that class of men who pray in secret, but in 
the presence of their fellowmen seem wholly indif- 
ferent to matters spiritual. 

When they subscribe to public enterprises, to 
the support of the church or give to charity, they 
give grudgingly, not because they begrudge the bene- 
ficiaries the money, but because they cannot stand 
the publicity that it gives them. 

Such a man was William Constad. To his 
neighbors he had the reputation of being irreligious, 
simply because he did not enter into the religious 
work as did others. 

When the question was put, as it often was, 

125 



126 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

" How many of you feel sure of heaven? " William 
Constad remained seated. When the question was 
asked, as it sometimes was, " How many hope that 
they will be saved ?" William Constad remained 
seated. He was non-committal. When the sub- 
scription paper was passed for the support of the 
church, he was not the lowest on the list, but he was 
far from being the highest. 

Before I learned to know him well I expressed 
myself to Father Rose as being surprised at his 
tight-fistedness. But afterwards I had no such 
criticism. In confidence I learned much that the 
public knew nothing about. I learned that but for 
Constad the church at that place would have very 
slim support. 

In December, soon after the schoolhouse had 
been repaired, the weather turned bitterly cold, and 
one day when the storm was extremely bad there 
was a knock on the schoolhouse door. It was Con- 
stad. He called me outside and said : " I want to 
talk with you about a few of the poor children in 
the school. We have two or three families that are 
not clothed for this kind of weather. Now, I want 
to help them but I can't very well afford to do so. 
There are so many who just bleed a fellow if they 
suspect he has a heart; and if it is known that one 
will help, many who do not need assistance try to 
get it. You are in a position to do such work in- 



A TEACHER'S RESPONSIBILITY 127 

telligently and I want you to do it, and I'll furnish 
the money. All the money that is needed to make all 
the children properly clothed you can have, and I 
give it on one condition only, which is, that the 
people whom you supply shall not know me in the 
matter." 

Within a week the three families mentioned in 
an early chapter of this book were supplied with 
good comfortable clothing. 

On the Sunday following it was a pleasure and 
a pretty sight to see these children come to church 
clothed in good warm clothing. 

It is not difficult to analyze the feelings of the 
man who was responsible for a dozen being suffi- 
ciently clothed to attend church, and he had the 
satisfaction of knowing that they felt under no obli- 
gation to him. One must be endowed with more 
than ordinary sense to know that for one to help 
his neighbor who is in deep financial distress, one 
must either give this help secretly or give it as a 
pleasure to himself, if he would retain that neigh- 
bor's good will. 

The sting of ingratitude is most painful, but 
there is nothing more common. The individual who 
has become a beneficiary to the extent that he con- 
siders his very existence is due to another's assist- 
ance experiences feelings of revolt that not infre- 
quently resolve into hate. 



128 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

In doing good deeds the wise man will not let 
his right hand know what his left hand does. This 
principle has its application to many lines of en- 
deavor — to the work of the teacher and the preacher, 
as well as to the work of the philanthropist. Many, 
many men have found to their bitter disappointment 
that their good deeds were unappreciated — they con- 
sider the world ungrateful. 

The doctor laments the fact that gratitude does 
not outlive the disease. The landlord remembers the 
ingratitude of his tenant whom he provided with 
the necessities of life till he could get a crop; the 
politician remembers the many men in office that 
are there through his endeavors, but since then, they 
know him not. The giver of alms often claims as 
his reward the hatred of those to whom he has 
ministered. 

To all such it may profitably be said, " When thou 
visiteth the sick, or when thou providest the tenant 
with groceries, or giveth thine alms to the poor, or 
scratchest thy ticket in the interests of a friend, for- 
get it most speedily; otherwise ye have no reward." 
Of all of Constad's good works his greatest was 
along the lines that would be helpful to boys. He 
never saw a book on pedagogy, but he had certain 
ideas that were sound. He believed in providing 
pleasures for them rather than in depriving them 
of pleasures. He believed in opening his own house 



A TEACHER'S RESPONSIBILITY 129 

to his children's friends, rather than have his own 
children go to places where their amusements were 
questionable. He believed that it was better to have 
plenty of social entertainment in the Crossing neigh- 
borhood than to suppress it as much as possible and 
force the young people to seek it in distant places. 
He believed that when the boys of his neighborhood 
gave as a reason for Sunday baseball, that the gate 
receipts were better on that day, and that they had 
to have gate receipts in order to get their supplies, 
it was up to him to subsidize that ball team, 
thereby removing the necessity (as the boys con- 
sidered it) for Sunday violation. 

He believed that a young man who committed a 
wrong should be forgiven and given at least one more 
chance. His excuse for forgiving the young man who 
forged his name to a check, and for allowing him to 
work for him to pay back the money he had thus 
unlawfully obtained and squandered, was that he 
himself owed his success in life to a mere accident. 
Here is the story in his own words. 

" I was a very dishonest young man. Not only 
was I crooked in my dealings but I actually took 
things that did not belong to me. My father was a 
wealthy and a very careless man. He loved his chil- 
dren and believed in them. He felt it was wrong 
to watch them. Whatever they told him, he never 
questioned. He kept money in the house and it 



130 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

was where the children could get to it, unre- 
strained. But he never believed that he had a 
child who would take a cent without accounting for 
it. I became an exception. First, pennies, then 
dimes, and later a bill. I went to bed early every 
night — that was what my father thought. We lived 
in a city then. I went up to my room, but within a 
few minutes I was with the worst boys and in most 
questionable places, and all this time I was my 
father's pride. By mere accident my father discov- 
ered that I had been derelict in a small matter, and 
when once his confidence was shaken he began a 
most searching inquisition. This inquisition dis- 
covered to him that his son was leading a, dissipated 
life and that he was both a liar and a thief. 

" At once he began to make restitution for the 
things wherein he had been remiss. He accepted the 
situation as he found it, and assumed full respon- 
sibility for it all. He had indulged in unpardonable 
credulity. Temptations to do< wrong and unlimited 
opportunity after yielding to temptations to escape 
detection had been afforded his children. Yes sir, 
he had hidden nothing from his children up to this 
time, nor did he begin it there. He told me in quiet 
tones that I was a liar; that I had betrayed his con- 
fidence; that I was a thief, and had stolen from one 
who had always meant to be very kind to me. It 



it 

a 



A TEACHER'S RESPONSIBILITY 131 

was most humiliating to have him say all this, and 
to have him conclude by saying ' It is all my fault. 
Poor boy! All these years I have been making 
money, and felt I was living for you, but I have 
neglected you, and have placed before you tempta- 
tions that were too strong for you. The only ques- 
tion now, my son, is : " Can we make it all right 
again: 

Then began our new life. 

He exacted but one promise of me, and gave 
me strictly to understand that it was a promise never 
to be broken. That promise was that I would never 
tell him an untruth. After making him that prom- 
ise, he said, ' If you do a wrong and 1 question you 
about it, tell me the whole truth and we will fix it all 
up and try to do better afterwards, but if you tell 
me a lie, it may cause me never to trust you again.' 
In addition to exacting the promise, the drawer con- 
taining the money was locked. Never again would 
he allow money of even a very small denomination 
to lie around, where it might be picked up by little 
children or by the servants. 

" His next step was to form a closer association 
with his family, and our home was opened to our 
friends. True, it had not, before this, been denied 
them, but there had been no effort made to have them 
there. 



132 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

" I was privileged and urged thereafter to have 
my friends come to our home, and although I did 
not have to be directed in my choice of friends, 
I found myself desiring a different friendship from 
that which I had been forming in the places of vice. 

" When I think of my narrow escape/' he con- 
tinued, " I shudder to think of what might have been 
the consequences had it not been for the timely 
detection, and if, then, I had had an austere and un- 
forgiving father. I claim no credit for my being 
an honest citizen, and a man whose business integrity 
is undoubted, and I wonder if to-day, were I a con- 
vict in some state prison, which, undoubtedly but 
for the accident, I would be, would I assume full 
responsibility for a blasted life? I believe I would 
not. I would have been the result of an environ- 
ment as truly as I am the result of an environment." 

In giving me this bit of his personal history, he 
offered the following as his reason : 

" I give you this personal experience because 
you are a teacher and will have great opportunities 
for doing much for the boys and girls. You will 
also have great opportunities for committing im- 
measurable injury. 

" Morally, teachers are an exceptional people. 
I do not except the ministry, when I say they have 
no superiors. I have studied teachers all my life. 



A TEACHER'S RESPONSIBILITY 133 

I knew many of them before I came West, and I 
know they are a superior class of people. They are 
usually the very best students that the schools pro- 
duce. They come, generally speaking, from the best 
homes. Consequently we have little to fear con- 
cerning their morals, but there is one grave danger, 
and that is that such people are not wise to the 
ways of the world. Like my father, they are too 
much inclined to undue credulity, and this as I have 
shown may lead to bad results. 

' Sometimes we find a teacher who looks lightly 
upon wrongdoing; that is unusual, but the former 
fault is quite a common one. Sometimes that fault is 
due to downright stupidity, but most often to an un- 
natural and unwarranted confidence. 

" The teacher who is a safe proposition to con- 
sider in the matter of directing young people must 
be ever on the alert. He need not, and if sane he 
will not, give the young under his care to feel that 
they are under surveillance, but it is more impor- 
tant that he know just what is being done than it is 
for the merchant to know what his employees are 
doing. 

" You teachers frequently grow rather senti- 
mental, and give for your opinions concerning 
such matter as I am discussing doctrines which if 
practised by the business world would overcrowd 



134 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

our penitentiaries in a very short time. This does 
not mean that people are dishonest, but it does mean 
that people are weak, and that there is such a thing 
as making it easy to do wrong. The strict and care- 
ful auditing of the accounts of the public official 
makes for honest service. Post office inspectors, 
bank inspectors, combination locks and cash regis- 
ters are not reflections upon man's integrity. They 
all help make an honest citizenship. The teacher 
who thoughtlessly or wilfully permits deception, 
cheating, or lying, or makes it possible through his 
mismanagement for the wrongs to happen, is as 
unfit for the position which he occupies as is the 
trustee of public funds when thoughtlessly or wil- 
fully he is derelict in his service. And the results 
will be more disastrous in the case of the teacher." 
So spoke the man who never spoke unkindly of 
his neighbors. He had had an experience that made 
him have charity for his fellowmen. He was timid 
when it came to* professing his virtues, but bold in 
defending the reputation of another. 

It seems to be a truth, and yet it is not always 
possible of verification, that no one can really 
sympathize with the unfortunate, the sick, the poor 
or the morally delinquent unless it in some way 
touches a real experience either in his life or in the 
life of one near and dear to him. 



A TEACHER'S RESPONSIBILITY 135 

The teacher who has drunk deeply from sor- 
row's cup, and is rich in experience that has left him 
not hardened and embittered against the world, but 
softened and sweetened with a charity that looks for 
goodness in all men and in all women, and who sees 
evil as the inevitable result of vicious environmental 
conditions, has a preparation for a life work that 
has for its accomplishment the building of a citizen- 
ship based upon the love of man for man. 



CHAPTER XIII 
Christmas Vacation 

The Crossing School was the largest school in 
the county. 

After the corn was gathered the larger boys, 
young men grown, came in for a few months. If 
the spring was backward they remained in till the 
middle of March, but February brings sunshiny days 
some years, and farming, such as sowing oats, 
cutting stalks, cutting hedge, making fence and 
breaking colts begins from two to three weeks earlier. 
Some years there is little sunshine during the month 
of February, and March may be a very disagreeable 
month, with its rains, snows, sleets and winds. But 
March is not a time of year when farmers can regard 
the weather. At that time of year there are hun- 
dreds of things to be done. If the farmer is a man 
who owns his farm, he has horses, cattle and hogs 
(and this is the season for colts, calves and pigs), 
and these must all be protected against the weather. 
If the farmer does not own his farm, March is his 
moving time. These various activities call for the 
able-bodied young men, and by the middle of April 
they will be needed if ever at all. 

It is certainly ideal to have these young men in 
136 



CHRISTMAS VACATION 137 

till the close of the school year, but there are grave 
economic questions that must be considered, and 
they will be considered. 

Farming is a business that must be done at cer- 
tain periods or not at all. Farming is a business that 
will permit of no neglect. There are lines of public 
service that seem to grow without much activity on 
the part of those who reap the benefits, but there is 
a maxim which is old but true, that " He who by 
the plow would thrive, must either hold the plow or 
drive." 

In all the efforts to give rural people the " social 
uplift " none has solved the labor problems. Oats 
and spring wheat must be sowed in season. Alfalfa 
must be sowed in dry countries in the spring, and 
the fall won't do. Winter wheat must be sowed in 
the fall. Wheat and oats must be cut when ripe, 
corn must be husked when matured, colts, calves and 
pigs must be cared for when they are little and until 
they are ready for the market, and no amount of 
theorizing will make it different. Farmers should 
do a thousand things they do not do. They should 
cooperate for buying and selling. They should in- 
terest themselves in political and social affairs, estab- 
lish rural community centres, resurrect the decadent 
rural church; but after it is all said there still exists 
that demand on the farmer's time that the bravest of 
them dare not but honor. 



138 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

There are those who have not had farm experi- 
ence who can solve these questions, but they do not 
get the same answers that the farmer gets. Those 
without farm experience see the improved machinery 
in the city implement house, and at once pronounce 
farming a sedentary occupation and manual labor 
a lost art. No longer does the farmer follow a plow 
or harrow all day, walking in run-over shoes. No 
longer does he heed to know how to make a double- 
band to bind his wheat while the reflected sun burns 
till he wishes he might die, regardless of his prepara- 
tion. He just rides all day long. Plowing or reap- 
ing, mowing or raking, he rides. To the man whose 
nearest approach to the soil is the book advertising 
farm machinery, farming is an occupation of riding 
and waiting. 

To the economist there is no business that is 
more exacting of its investors than farming. No 
more serious and important topic can engage the at- 
tention of the student. The farmer is manager, 
capitalist and laborer, and if he succeeds he must 
perform three important functions: to decide ques- 
tions of investment; to oversee the work and help 
to perform it ; to sell the produce of the farm. In 
addition to these important functions he must study 
crop production, crop rotation, conservation of soil 
fertility and animal husbandry. He must be a 
mechanic. He must be as capable of changing his 



CHRISTMAS VACATION 139 

matured plans on a moment's notice as is the general 
on the battlefield. With all these qualifications, is 
it any wonder that rural districts are the seed-beds 
from which cities are stocked? 

After all is said, farming requires hard work, 
and it requires long hours. The man in the city who 
gets to his business at eight o'clock has no occasion 
to rise at four or even five; but with the farmer it 
is different. For many good reasons cows should be 
milked early, and for just as good reasons they can- 
not be milked early in the afternoon. The care of 
live stock requires attention early in the morning and 
attention at the close of the day. 

To those who have never seen beautiful sunrises, 
while driving cows from the dewy meadows to be 
milked, the labors of the farm as just described will 
be unattractive, but those who have seen, all sides 
of life have a longing and a yearning for the farm 
which through some unfortunate circumstance they 
left. 

This leaving the farm may have been due to ill 
health, loss of capital, or to a desire to see the city ; 
or to obtain more liberal income or for more agree- 
able social life, or for intellectual and aesthetic en- 
joyment. To whatever it is due, there remains in 
the minds of such people a fond memory of the days 
when they lived there, of the green pastures, the 
swimming hole, the red -haw tree, the days when the 



140 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

creeks overflowed their banks and it was too wet 
to work in the fields ; of the seasons that were not 
all alike; of snow in the winter that meant sleigh 
rides and sled rides; bells and belles; coasting and 
skating; spelling schools and singing schools; liter- 
ary societies, protracted meetings and parties. Those 
who have been the rounds and have seen it all will 
look back to the days of stone bruises, and feet that 
were so badly chapped that one would almost rather 
stay up all night than wash them, and wish it all 
might be lived over again. 

President McKinley on his last western tour 
arose from his Pullman berth just after daylight on 
an early September morning. The train had for 
some reason stopped in the open country. He saw a 
sight that caused him to rush to his sleeping cabinet 
officers who accompanied him and call them to come 
to the rear platform. The sight was but of two 
little boys who had come out barefooted to milk 
cows. They had driven the cows from the warm 
spots on which they had been sleeping and had ap- 
propriated these places for warming their feet. 
President McKinley said: "Gentlemen, that sight 
recalls the happiest days of my life"; and each 
cabinet officer in turn expressed a like sentiment, 
and remembered having warmed his feet in that 
sarnie way. America's great statesmen then gave 



CHRISTMAS VACATION 141 

three cheers in the early morning for the little boys 
in Iowa who remlinded them of their happiest days. 

There are a few months in the winter when busi- 
ness on the farm is less rushing than during other 
times, but work begins early in the spring and ex- 
tends late into the fall, even up to December. 

The boys in the Crossing neighborhood were all 
in school by the beginning of the fourth month, but in 
three weeks from that time school was dismissed for 
the winter vacation. Those who needed school most 
and who had worked the hardest to get it were con- 
fronted with a two weeks' vacation just about the 
time they had settled down to their studies. With 
the certainty that they must quit school early in the 
spring this vacation seemed, so far as this belated 
group was concerned, entirely out of place. How- 
ever, it was useless to argue that a week was suffi- 
ciently long, or that there should be no vacation for 
those who were late in entering. My offer to give 
special work for them was looked upon with dis- 
favor. They always had broken into the work by 
this vacation and regardless of the pressing need 
they must continue to break into it. Another bad 
feature of the work was the total absence of any 
gradation of the work that granted those who en- 
tered late any particular benefit. They dropped into 
the same classes that they had been in the year 



142 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

before and went over practically the same ground. 
Consequently by the time I had aroused an interest 
there arose outside distractions which far exceeded 
in attractiveness anything I had to offer. 

The generally accepted statement that the pupils 
of the rural schools have not so many distracting 
influences as the pupil of the town schools was not 
borne out by my experience in the Constad School. 
They had the same social cravings, and while the 
opportunities for gratification were not so plentiful, 
their reaction to the few was complete and the time 
involved was greater. 

The month of November and half of December 
was taken up with protracted meeting and with its 
close the adjacent communities began their meetings, 
and the young people's evenings were more occupied 
than ever. 

The Christmas time was a cessation of matters 
religious and matters educational. Christmas trees 
and parties were planned on extensive scales. 
Christmas trees on Christmas eve and Christmas 
night, New Year's trees on New Year's eve and New 
Year's night gave each community a chance to cele- 
brate. These were their midwinter festivals. We 
gave our Christmas tree in the afternoon and by so 
doing solved the problem of how to have one more 
celebration in that part of the country. 



CHRISTMAS VACATION 143 

Those who have attended the city tree and 
listened to the little children speak their little Christ- 
mas pieces and sing their pretty little songs and at 
the close of those exercises have seen each get his 
Christmas gift of gumdrops and cheap candy and two 
peanuts and some more cheap candy all done up in a 
cornucopia or mosquito bar netting may have had 
a fairly good time, but such a celebration is very 
simple as compared with the Constad Crossing 
° tree." 

In the first place we built a stage the full width 
of the building. In the second place we had a real 
evergreen tree at the right end of the stage. In the 
third place we had a curtain that completely hid 
from view both stage and tree. In the fourth place, 
from the time the curtain w'as hung till it was pushed 
aside to expose to view the Christmas tree with its 
variegated colors, its dolls and drums for the little 
ones, gloves, mittens and books for the big ones — 
plush albums for the " best ones," and neck com- 
forters of yellow and red yarns, 18 inches wide and 
8 feet long, made by the " best one " for the " best 
one," all was excitement and expectation. 

Nearly all Christmas trees are wonderful and 
this differed only in being very wonderful. It would 
be useless to describe it or to even begin to tell what 
all it held. First came the program, and it was not 



144 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

materially different from all programs except that 
it lasted longer. It opened with a real Christmas 
anthem, which was followed by some " speaking.'' 
This was rudely interrupted by one of the men who 
insisted on treating the audience to apples. This 
required two bushels, but he was supplied. Then 
the program started, but only to be interrupted by 
another who passed through the crowd with peanuts. 
It was all quite informal, and everyone was having 
a good time. The calling off of the presents was the 
real event of the evening. And of all the presents ! 
Some discovered their own old clothes done up in 
neat bundles. One man who had augmented an 
argument with a hatchet drew down six hatchets; 
another who had the reputation of rustling cattle 
got a calf's tail, and every boy that had been jilted 
was presented with a little mitten; everybody got 
something and usually many things. The teacher 
was not forgotten; indeed, his present was kept till 
the last. His present was Shakespeare's Complete 
Works. 

If there is one thing that is more difficult than all 
other things, it is for a teacher to pretend that he 
does not know what's being done when sixty or 
seventy pupils are taking up a collection to buy him 
a present. The next most difficult thing is to show 
the proper appreciation. 



CHRISTMAS VACATION 145 

To give a present is difficult, but to receive one is 
a torture. It was with much pleasure, however, that 
I received this particular present. I was particu- 
larly fond of Shakespeare. I owed my love for 
this great work to no teacher. In fact I liked it in 
spite of the efforts my teachers had made to make 
me dislike it. I do not mean that they intended that 
I should dislike Shakespeare, but their methods of 
attack were such that dislike was the usual result 
that they secured. With my Shakespeare as with 
Dickens or Scott or Irving, I found happy, profitable 
hours. I read " Macbeth," " Hamlet," " As You 
Like It," just as I read anything that I like. I did 
not stop to dissect and parse every line, but I read 
them enjoying them and always wanted to read 
more. When I had the opportunity some years later 
to attend the Shakespearean plays by the great actors 
Booth and Barrett, I attended for seven successive 
evenings, and these were the greatest evenings of 
my life. I may not have learned the great lessons 
of this greatest English dramatist as some great 
teachers would present them, but what I did get 
pleased me, and the effect upon my life was good. 
The works of Shakespeare presented me by my rural 
school are my most loved and most worn books. 

As I mention in a subsequent chapter, I had 
been telling these stories to my school. I had made 
10 



146 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

use of " Hamlet," " King Lear/' " The Comedy of 
Errors/' and " The Taming of the Shrew," and 
others for my morning exercises, and while I did 
not like presents, my readers will appreciate the sat- 
isfaction that it was to me to know that these boys 
and girls, after discussing what they might get me, 
decided upon what they liked best, feeling it was 
what would most please me. 

That " Christmas tree " was one joyous occa- 
sion. It is and was the one great event of the 
year — old scores were there settled, forgiven or 
forgotten. 

Fam)ily names are never more prominent or 
mothers' joys are never so nearly complete as when 
their daughters' names are being " called." For is 
this not unmistakable evidence of popularity? The 
mother who would not augment this evidence by add- 
ing to the list of presents is an unnatural mother, 
too. They all condemn the practice, but, God bless 
them! they all indulge in it, and the fact that they 
do and the fact that they will makes life worth 
living. 

There is no time of the year more precious than 
Christmas to those who are living right, to those 
who love and deserve to be loved. 

The dear Christmas pieces of Field and Riley! 
How they stir our hearts and bring back those happy, 
happy memories ! 



CHRISTMAS VACATION 147 

Christmas! Christmas when the roads are 
drifted, making Santa's visit a physical impossibility. 
But the real Santa came and left unmistakable evi- 
dence of his individuality — cookies and candy, home- 
made, and then we knew. Happy, happy memories ! 

As I left for home to take my two* weeks' vaca- 
tion it was with a feeling of love for the people 
who were giving me a greater insight into life and 
my responsibilities to society. 



CHAPTER XIV 

Rural Community Interest 

School opened after the vacation with a very- 
full enrollment. Every seat was occupied and the 
pupils seemed anxious to get to their studies. This 
was especially true of the older boys who had but a 
few weeks to- attend. It is during these few weeks 
that the rural school is either at its best or worst. 
It is during these weeks that the teacher must lead 
the strenuous life. 

On the first morning a young man knocked at the 
schoolhouse door and I bade him enter and take a 
seat in the visitor's chair. As was the custom I 
handed him a book in order that he might observe the 
work of the recitation which was in progress. He 
remained until the morning recess, at which time we 
visited together, and during our conversation he in- 
formed me that he was thinking of going to school. 

He was twenty-six years old, and was considered 
one of the good farmers of that neighborhood, and 
it was only after a considerable length of time that 
I understood that it was his intention to come to 
school to me. He said, " I am over 21 years of age 
but the board has given me permission to attend if 
you have no* objections. I took a load of hogs to 
148 



RURAL COMMUNITY INTEREST 149 

market yesterday, and do you know I never was so 
embarrassed in all my life. I felt sure they had made 
some mistake in figuring up what they came to, and 
I had to ask a man around town to go over the 
figures for me. I could see a look of disdain come 
over his face, almost a look of pity, and do you know, 
I could buy that fellow several times, and yet I had to 
ask him to figure up what a load of my hogs should 
come to. As I drove home I thought over this matter 
and the more I thought, the more I blamed myself 
and the more ashamed I became of my ignorance, 
and before I had reached home I resolved that before 
I raised another crop or fed another hog I would be 
able to do my own figuring. If you will stand by me 
you will be the only person whom I shall ever ask 
to show me how to figure hogs or corn or interest.' ' 
He pulled from under his coat a tattered, " dog- 
eared " old Ray's Third Part of Arithmetic. I saw 
he was in earnest and immediately set about finding 
out what he had done so that I might have him begin 
work at once. He knew the multiplication table up 
to the fives and had had a little work in short divi- 
sion, but long division never had been mastered, and 
he told me that long division was the subject that 
drove him out of school years ago. My first assign- 
ment to him was the multiplication table beginning 
with the sixes. As soon as I had made this assign- 
ment he inquired where he might sit. I gave him all 



150 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

I had to offer, the visitor's chair and the teacher's 
desk. At noon I asked him if he was going to 
dinner. He said, " No, I am not hungry." At one 
o'clock he was yet in his seat working on that multi- 
plication table. Through the long afternoon it 
seemed that his eyes were never taken from the book ; 
sometimes they were closed as if in meditation, but 
he worked continuously. After four o'clock when 
the children were all gone I went to him and asked 
him how he was getting along. He handed me the 
book, which I hardly needed, and proceeded to say 
the multiplication table beginning with the sixes. He 
went on through to twelve times twelve without a 
mistake. I tried him on the seven times eight, and 
the nine times seven, and the six times seven, and the 
eight times nine, but he had them all. Before going 
home I gave him some assistance with short division, 
and to my surprise when I was ready to leave the 
school building, he said he would not go for awhile 
yet. In the morning at eight o'clock when I arrived 
at the school I found a good fire and young Mr. 
Turner was in his seat working on short division, 
which he said he had almost finished. He continued 
his work throughout the remainder of the term, 
working just as hard in school as he would have 
worked on the farm. He studied evenings after the 
close of the term, and before the close of the school 
year had mastered Ray's Third Part of Arithmetic. 



RURAL COMMUNITY INTEREST 151 

This interest which he manifested was no other 
than an objective one. He wanted arithmetic not 
for itself, but for what he might do with it. He 
had arrived at an age when he realized how this 
subject functioned with the business of his every- 
day life. Regardless of which interest is the higher, 
the objective or the subjective, we must agree that 
the objective is the determining factor in the educa- 
tion of most people, and the one most lacking in our 
rural schools. 

In the light of past experience I see many lost op- 
portunities to that school. There were many anxious 
for an education such as was offered, but they could 
not get it. The time of the teacher was too full to 
give the needed attention ; while it was possible for 
a student as mature as Mr. Turner to do good work, 
it was not possible for those of immature years. 

There are two types of school that are far from 
efficient, the one in which the teacher helps too much 
and the one in which he does not help enough. Mine 
was of the latter type. I had pupils who walked long 
distances and received but little of my time. With 
the right kind of school, which I attempt to discuss 
in a subsequent chapter entitled " Suggested Im- 
provements," the country can be made the ideal place 
in which to live. 

To bring clearly before the reader's mind my 
estimate of some of the advantages and disadvan- 



152 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

tages of both rural and city life the following recital 
of two incidents, one of rural life and one of city 
life, is given: 

At the Crossing there were genuine community 
interests. There were few people who had not a 
genuine interest in the community, and there were 
none so poor or so unimportant as to be without 
friends. There were none who were very wealthy, 
but nearly all had plenty, and those who had not, 
never knew what real want meant. 

In February of this year the cold weather was at 
its worst. For three months the ground had been 
covered with snow, and with the coming of the last 
month of winter came a storm that swept all the 
states of the Middle West. This blizzard began on 
the evening of the third day of the month and by 
the next morning it was almost impossible to find 
one's way through the heavy falling snow. At 9 
o'clock but few of the pupils had arrived, but they 
continued to come cold and wet till altogether there 
were about thirty present. 

The task of caring for pupils with such accommo- 
dations as were at hand is no easy one, and one which 
is attended with great responsibility. Many who 
read this book will read this chapter with little in- 
terest. It is entirely without their experience. Those 
who have grown up within a few blocks of the school 
building and are accustomed to the walks free from 



RURAL COMMUNITY INTEREST 153 

mud and snow, regardless of the weather, cannot 
appreciate the labor and danger involved in a two 
mile walk through deep snow drifts. Those who are 
accustomed to school buildings heated with hot air or 
steam, to wardrobes where one may go to adjust 
clothing, to rest rooms equipped with couches and 
easy chairs, where pupils who are indisposed may 
rest and care for themselves, will not be able to ap- 
preciate the dangers and discomfort involved in 
attending a rural school under conditions of twenty- 
five years ago or even at the present time. 

The modern school building is the positive and 
definite measure of a community's awareness of 
parental responsibility and obligation. 

In considering the rural school you must not 
expect to find that most important person in a school 
system — the janitor. The teacher is janitor, and 
parent and nurse. He (or she) must be on hand 
early on cold mornings to start the fire, sweep the 
drifts of snow from the porch, shovel walks to the 
woodpile or coal house, pump (if there be one) and 
to the outhouses which upon such mornings are likely 
to be drifted full of snow. It is the duty of the 
teacher not to make everything comfortable, but to 
make, so far as possible, things less miserable. A 
comparison of the snow drifted outhouse with its 
ice-coated benches and absolute absence of any 
modern convenience with the inside toilets of a 



154 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

modern building exposes to the public a condition 
which we would improve without casting reflection 
upon those who suffer in order that the tax levy be 
kept down ; who suffer because " it has always 
been so." 

On this particular morning everyone who came 
was soaked from the deep snow which he or she 
had been forced to wade. In years since, when I 
have witnessed the approaches to our colleges and 
universities cleared of snow with horse-drawn 
scrapers, my mind goes back and my heart goes out 
to the child of tender years who is breaking her own 
path over storm-swept hills to the little schoolhouse 
for which she is bound, and involuntarily I am asking 
" How long, how long will this injustice be con- 
tinued? " Among my pupils on this morning was 
Rachel, she after whom Mother Rose had inquired 
on the first day ; she who had the care of four younger 
brothers and sisters. Her mother had died at a time 
when Rachel most needed her. This girl was there. 
She had never missed a day. She was dreadfully in 
earnest. It was her ambition to become a teacher in 
order that she might do more for her brothers and 
sisters. 

It was plain to me, inexperienced and young as 
I was, that she should not have come to school. It 
it unnecessary that I enter into a discussion of her 
trouble, a trouble of which she herself was probably 



RURAL COMMUNITY INTEREST 155 

ignorant. Here was a condition, and here is a con- 
dition — a young girl just entering upon womanhood 
compelled to suffer an exposure that probably has for 
its toll the lives or the ruined health of thousands. 

In loco parentis! No mother or father is alone 
capable of properly bringing up a family; both are 
necessary. No woman or man is capable of properly 
managing a mixed school and there should be legisla- 
tion prohibiting it. 

Here is a girl needing a woman's care. She 
sits cold and neglected, and but for the neighbor- 
hood mother, Mother Rose, she would have died 
uncared for. 

Teachers must realize their responsibility. 
School requires an exercise of common sense on the 
part of the teacher, and the teacher who cannot rise 
to the occasion is a danger to the public welfare. 

As soon as possible I sent a boy with a note to 
my boarding place. The note stated the need that 
Rachel had of a woman's care, and within half an 
hour she was gently led to the big sled that was 
driven by Father Rose. 

It is not my purpose to make this account un- 
duly tragic. Many of my readers have had an ex- 
perience like that which came to me and well know 
an isolated case is not being cited. Within two days, 
at the home of Father and Mother Rose Rachel lay 
dead, and in her death four children lost a second 



156 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

mother, a tragedy due to pernicious methods of 
taxation. 

Four miles away was the cemetery where the 
Crossing people buried their dead. The funeral pro- 
cession was much different from the ordinary. A 
large sled to which were hitched four horses was the 
only vehicle. On horseback preceding the sled rode 
six young men breaking the road as well as they 
could. Before leaving the house Father Rose spoke 
to the few neighbors gathered, offered a prayer and 
delegated to their teacher the conduct of the services 
at the grave. There was no minister in the neighbor- 
hood at that time and from this duty and obligation 
the teacher did not shrink, although he felt most 
keenly his unfitness. At this funeral there was no 
blanket of roses to hide the excavations of the grave ; 
there was no " profusion of flowers." Neither were 
there hired grave-diggers, hired pallbearers nor 
hearse; but there was real mourning, real affection 
for those who were left behind, for the children twice 
left motherless, and the father whose life was over- 
running with disappointment and bitterness. There 
was love and sympathy for them all. Love and 
sympathy ending not in words, but in homes for 
each motherless child. 

Orphans' homes and poorhouses are not recruited 
from rural communities. " The pauper whom no- 
body owns " has no application to the world in which 



RURAL COMMUNITY INTEREST 157 

the golden rule is the basis of the moral code, and 
yet how often have we heard it said: " I hate the 
country, for it is here where things small are weighed, 
discussed and dissected. It is here where gossip and 
slander thrive best. It is here where everyone knows 
all about his neighbor's affairs." 

This is a real rural condition and it is one not 
common to the city. In no way can it be attributed 
to a difference in the character of the two, the 
ruralite and the urbanite. 

Because of the knowledge that rural people have 
of each other there is a community interest. The 
gossip alluded to is but one of the results that come 
from this intimate acquaintance. It is here as no- 
where else that we find people bound together with 
a common experience. 

Here the success of one in no way impedes the 
progress of a neighbor. They are not competitors, 
but co-workers. They have common interests, suc- 
cess depending upon their labor and the weather. A 
drought means hard times for all, and plentiful, timely 
rains mean good times for all. When markets are 
juggled all are affected in the same way. When the 
market prices of farm products are low and every- 
thing that the farmer buys is high, their grievance is 
common, and thereby they are bound more closely 
together. 

A close analysis of the status of rural social 



158 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

relations will show that in spite of alleged bickerings, 
nowhere is there truer regard for one's fellowman, 
nowhere such real friendship, a friendship that would 
divide another's sorrow sooner than share his happi- 
ness, than among the rural people. Here, as nowhere 
else, man is not himself alone, but an integral part 
of a relationship that is based upon trials and 
triumphs, disappointments and happy attainments 
common to the individuals of the group. 

The criticism offered on rural society cannot be 
made upon urban society. In the latter is not to be 
found the friendly or unfriendly interest, but the 
cold, cruel, selfish independence and unconcern. 
This criticism is not made for the purpose of differ- 
entiating between the rural and urban people. 
Fundamentally there is no difference. 

The urbanite, too, has reacted to his particular 
environment — diversity of interests, the sharp busi- 
ness competition, the absence of personal interest, 
the absolute adherence to business principles, credit 
extended to none but those of sound financial stand- 
ing except in cases of prominent people. Everyone 
is too engrossed with his own affairs, too intent upon 
struggling for existence, too jealous of the position 
he has already gained, to weigh matters either small 
or large — or to gossip or slander. He neither loves 
nor hates — he knows but few, and these few are 
nothing to him nor is he anything to them. 



RURAL COMMUNITY INTEREST 159 

In a former chapter I alluded to the fact that 
the criminal, the pauper, the unfortunate, drift to the 
city. It is there among the multitude who lack not 
only community interest but human interest that one 
may abide safe from molestation except from the 
officers whose business it is to inspect life's seamy 
side and probe the sores of suffering, fallen people. 

Why the social outcast must leave the rural com- 
munity, why he must go to the city, is understand- 
able ; but why many a moral, upright man who loves 
his neighbor and wishes to be loved in return, who 
desires that his children shall grow up respected and 
respecting, free from a business world that counts 
man but as a part of a machine and discards him 
without consideration when it is in the interests of 
big business to scrap the machine, must go to the city, 
is not so easily understood. 

Sociologists attribute the emigration of the rural 
young men and women of talent and capacity to the 
unattractiveness of farm life, and to the lack of 
opportunities for a liberal material income on the 
farm, and to the agreeable social life and the intel- 
lectual and aesthetic enjoyment in the city. 

Doubtless these are among the incentives, but the 
greatest of all reasons is the lack of knowledge of 
city life. Many of these advantages are available to 
the wealthy, but to those in moderate circumstances 
and those who must work for a living, these incen- 



160 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

tives are false, as thousands who have been led by 
them could testify. 

The young man raised in the country and accus- 
tomed to the best society that his community affords 
finds entrance into as good society in the city almost 
impossible unless he has money or influential friends. 
In the country he has been a factor in society, but 
in the city he finds that he is not. 

Having been accustomed to society he will have 
it, and eventually he accepts what is attainable, which 
is very often bad, and then a downward career is 
begun. 

Statistics give much on the girls who are lost 
through vice every year; but if figures were obtain- 
able the loss of character of young men who* go< to the 
city expecting liberal income, agreeable social life 
and intellectual, aesthetic enjoyment would be stu- 
pendous. Occasionally one makes his mark, but 
where one succeeds scores fail and go down in a 
misery of degradation and sin unknown to rural life. 

We have much written on " Back to the Farm," 
but much of it deals with the beauties of rural life 
written by those who know it by a few days' outing 
or an occasional visit to> some rural home. 

As I have tried to show, all is not pleasure and 
ease on the farm. We should not expect to find such 
a place in this world where the majority of men work 
for their daily bread. But there is more pleasure, 



RURAL COMMUNITY INTEREST 161 

more leisure time, more opportunity for social en- 
joyment, more oportunity for reading, for culture, 
for living a life in the open country than in the 
crowded city. For a day the sights of a city are 
alluring, but living in a city and having a job in a 
city, or being out of a job in a city, are as different 
from " seeing the city " for a day as plowing stump 
ground is different from visiting a summer resort. 
There are many excursions to the city; conven- 
tions of many kinds are held there and many places 
of amusement are there. To the casual observer it 
would seem that the city is one great whirl of 
pleasure. The beautiful streets, boulevards and 
parks, the large department stores and the theatres 
all look very attractive when he compares them with 
rural roads, the woods, the small stores and the 
opera house. But all these mean but little to the 
young man and young woman who work six or seven 
days in the week, usually for wages that barely carry 
them over from one pay day to the next. If the rural 
young man could study the throngs that crowd the 
thousands of cars in a city like Chicago between 
5 a.m. and 8 a.m., and 5 :30 p.m. and 7 p.m., he 
would be so impressed with the incorrectness of his 
notion of city life that he would yearn for the green 
fields, the horses and cattle, and for a people whose 
lives were being lived in freedom, away from the op- 
pressing cares that kill the body and dwarf the soul. 
11 



162 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

Admitting all that has been said against rural 
life is true (but it is not), it is the only life that is 
suited to the moderately well-to-do and to the respect- 
able poor. The wealthy can procure comforts in the 
city in spite of adverse conditions — they can control 
their environment, and the disrespectable poor can 
live less miserably in the city than elswhere. 

The great difficulty in arriving at proper conclu- 
sions is that we know so little of the life that the 
other man leads. We see always its best side. 

No place is the teacher more appreciated than in 
the rural schools. He has troubles, and they are not 
imaginary ones, either, but it is there that he gets 
credit for what he does. 

In a city of over 10,000 no teacher is known by 
many of the parents of his pupils. He becomes a 
part of a great machine and he does his particular 
work and there his feeling or responsibility ends. 

The teacher of the rural school who is prepared 
for his work has great opportunity for doing good. 
If he craves appreciation of his work, if he desires 
to live long in the memory of his people, he can find 
no place that excels the rural school. The first prep- 
aration for the rural teacher must be a love and a 
sympathy for rural life. 

A young man raised in a small town secures a 
rural school. The lonesomeness of it all nearly kills 
him. He longs for his home, but he cannot stay 



RURAL COMMUNITY INTEREST 163 

there because he must have employment. He hears 
of the opportunities for young men in the Golden 
West, and with credentials from his home bankers, 
his minister and his high school principal, and with 
a heart full of hope and trunk and grips packed with 
good clothes by a loving, trusting mother, he seeks 
his fortune in a far-off city. Before leaving home 
he secures a position which pays more money than 
his school paid him, and in this position he confidently 
expects prosperity and happiness, and in his antici- 
pation of an escape from a life of lonesomeness 
into one of business and social opportunity he is 
very happy. 

No larger or more delightful experience can come 
to the young man than that which comes in a trip 
across the beautiful western plains and up among 
and over the Rockies and down to the Pacific Coast. 
The world has nothing greater to offer. He who has 
seen the beauty and the grandeur of plains, moun- 
tains, gorges, canyons and cataracts and experienced 
the thrills of the wonderful and dangerous preci- 
pices over whose rim the train seems to lean as it 
rushes upward or downward and onward, finds all 
later experiences to suffer by comparison. The joy 
of all these thrills and experiences is his, and he is 
in the city of the Golden West! 

His work does not begin for ten days and in that 
time he makes the acquaintance of his first city. He 



164 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

writes home of the beautiful bay connected with the 
Pacific Ocean by Golden Gate, a passage four miles 
long and a mile wide ; of Golden Gate Park with its 
thousand acres, with over 300 acres of closely shaved 
sward, green and attractive the whole year round, and 
a greater area planted with semi-tropical shrubs and 
trees ! 

During his ten days he visits the many libraries, 
the six million dollar city hall which was twenty-five 
years in building, the beautiful churches, the great 
hospitals ! His passion for nature is being gratified 
— the mountains round about, the cliffs, the flowing 
and ebbing of the tides — all so interesting, so won- 
derful. As he walks about the piers he sees steam- 
ships from every port of the world and learns that 
the bay constitutes one of the finest harbors in the 
world; that from here extend many ship lines to 
China, Japan, Australia, Mexico, Central and South 
America, the Hawaiian and Philippine Islands — all 
so interesting, so wonderful, so educative! 

The ten days' respite expires and the work begins. 
It is a job that knows no week-end. The city that 
never records any month a higher mean temperature 
than 65 ° nor a lower mean temperature than 46 ° 
becomes his permanent abode at the beginning of 
the rainy season. In the land of semi-tropical plants 
he almost freezes and is never warm. He is now a 
part of a great steamship company, a very small 



RURAL COMMUNITY INTEREST 165 

part, with great responsibilities and (compared with 
his expense ) a very low salary. The salary that looked 
so attractive must be carefully spent or it will not 
do him from one pay day to the next and thoughts of 
sickness or a loss of position enter his mind for the 
first time. No longer is he taking his meals at one 
of the fine hotels where he stopped upon his arrival. 
Indeed, where he can get a wholesome meal at a 
price not prohibitive is no small part of his daily 
concern. He is bonded, and well he may be, for every 
day he has opportunities for making mistakes that 
would cost his company thousands of dollars. He 
goes to work in the morning when it is yet dark and 
returns to his room long after darkness has returned. 
When he left home he went with strong resolutions 
of Y. M. C. A. affiliations and of regular attendance 
at church, but he discovers both of these require 
time and money, and he has but little of either. 

The bay is still there, the parks are still open, 
the largest ferry boats in the world are making their 
regular trips across the bay, carrying hundreds of 
thousands of passengers every day, but his letters no 
longer allude to these things. 

Does he yet write of the attractiveness of a great 
city, contrasting it with the unattractiveness of his 
rural home? Are his letters filled with allusions to 
his "liberal material income," his " agreeable social 
life " and " the opportunities for intellectual and 



166 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

aesthetic en joy merit?" No. He writes of home. Not 
his new home, but his old home. In the midst of 
one of the world's busiest places his mind is back 
home, where they love him for what he is; where 
there are such words in the vocabulary as friend and 
neighbor ; where more than bare subsistence may 
be had without a "liberal income" and an 
" agreeable social " evening may be had without 
sacrificing an opportunity for full meals for a week 
following ; where a young man of industrious habits 
and clean morals is welcomed to the best of society 
and where society is based upon a manhood and a 
womanhood that are representative of thrift, honesty 
of purpose and clean morals; where social vice is 
unknown, drunkenness tabooed and virtue and tem- 
perance exalted. 

By comparison are our lots hard or easy. He is 
happy because he has a job. There are already many, 
many thousands in the city out of employment. This 
city is no> exception. 'Chicago 1 , Philadelphia, St. 
Louis are numbering their unemployed by the ten 
thousands. In the west many thousands are driven 
from the cities into the open country, but in spite of 
these conditions the great daily papers whose duty it 
is to boom the cities speak of the great prosperity, 
but say nothing of starving thousands, and in conse- 
quence thereof each incoming train and ship aug- 
ments the Army of Unemployed. 



RURAL COMMUNITY INTEREST 167 

Each letter brings news of business depression 
and of great suffering among the laboring people. 
Each letter expresses appreciation of the job he has. 
It is not good. It hardly pays expenses, but he has 
a room, and by careful management he has enough 
to eat. 

In this country the Native Sons are the last to 
be out of employment. Fidelity to duty and efficiency 
are not sufficient to compete with Native Sons and a 
letter brings the intelligence that within 30 days he 
will be out of a job. The labor situation is now such 
that there is scarcely employment for Native Sons. 

He becomes a soldier in the " Army of the Un- 
employed." He is face to face with a question for 
which no social settlement worker or economist has 
a solution. In the midst of millions of wealth men 
are wanting work. They and their families are 
starving. The Army of Unemployed who in time of 
national danger would be the ones who would first 
respond to a call to arms and who would gladly lay 
down their lives to protect property which they do 
not have, and which under present economic condi- 
tions they are not likely to have, are begging for 
work and fighting for bread. 

These are not, as many would have you believe, 
men who have wasted their substance in riotous liv- 
ing, but men who have enriched the owners of 
Big Business with their labor and in return received 



168 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

but sufficient remuneration to enable them to buy 
food to make if possible to perform more labor. 

In this book it is not the purpose to discuss this 
great question which becomes greater as time grows. 

What is in store for the man without capital a 
generation hence is the gravest question confronting 
a hundred million people. The economists agree that 
inefficiency is our greatest economic liability and that 
we must look to our schools for a greater social 
efficiency. 

The letters of the boy no longer tell of the won- 
ders of the city — beautiful parks, beautiful bays, 
mountains, city halls, steamships and libraries have 
little in them that appeals to the man who has no 
money and who is out of a job. 

The letters tell of futile attempts to secure em- 
ployment, of answering a want ad before daylight 
to find that a hundred had been there before him. 
Times grow worse and business becomes duller, and 
thousands and thousands more are thrown out of 
employment. Every day there are bread riots ; men 
are starving. But these stories are suppressed. The 
situation grows worse rather than better. Board and 
room rent are more than twice as high as back home. 
There is work back home but none out West. To 
return to his home and live or sta}^ in the city and 
starve are his alternatives. He chooses the former. 
Fortunately he has the money to pay his way, but 



RURAL COMMUNITY INTEREST 169 

what of the thousands of boys who are less fortu- 
nate ? These .must stay to starve, beg or steal. 

The economist who is himself on a good salary 
and has probably never experienced real want will 
say that it is only the inefficient who are out of em- 
ployment. This holds good when work is plentiful, 
but man's capacity for work does not make a position 
when the labor market is overrun any more than 
produce will create a market when there is over- 
production. 

This is a time when men's souls are tried, and 
it is a time when the unattractiveness of farm life 
grows less, and " opportunities for liberal material 
incomes, agreeable social life and intellectual aesthetic 
enjoyment provided by cities " grow infinites imally 
small. These lessons are most valuable if they come 
early so that escape is possible. Those who learn 
them and escape are very likely to lead happy, con- 
tented lives. They are then in a position (to appreciate 
their homes where want is unknown, to appreciate 
their neighbors who love them and who care whether 
their brothers starve, beg or steal. 

Many by force of circumstances become criminal, 
while some more fortunate escape. 

The cities are wrong, to a greater or less degree, 
in permitting such labor conditions as confront them 
every year, but the rural community is doubly guilty. 
It takes not the pains to inform itself of real urban 



170 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

conditions and it is unbelievably negligent concerning 
its own resources. Legitimate advertising is com- 
mendable, and legitimate advertising is a business 
in which rural communities have never invested. 

The cities draw from the rural population in a 
most natural way. 

Every attractive feature of a city is advertised. 
It is advertised in many ways. The daily papers 
directly advertise special business, and indirectly 
through their columns publish the city's greatness. 
Every article of commerce and trade bears the city 
stamp ; even the cars that carry the merchandise to* 
the rural community herald the name of the city from 
which they come. Every business of the city that 
amounts to anything advertises. The commission 
firms that sell the farmer's pigs and cattle see that 
the farmer carries in his pocket a memorandum 
book bearing the firm's name, and that he hangs upon 
the walls of his home calendars advertising the 
firm's business. Throughout rural communities em- 
blazoned on billboards are advertised all kinds of 
merchandise. All sorts of attractions are advertised 
in the papers, and thus the people read daily and are 
impressed with the city's greatness. The picture with 
urban settings of a stylish suit is shown on a hand- 
some man. The same with feminine wearing apparel, 
always shown with city surroundings, fashionable 
resorts, hotels, theatres and parks. This is business, 



RURAL COMMUNITY INTEREST 171 

and is right, but it is not right that the rural com- 
munities should neglect to do those things which 
would make known to the world the beauties and 
advantages of rural life. Homesteads should be kept 
so as to be attractive to the eye. They should bear 
the owner's name; the public highways should be 
kept in good condition. If there must be signboards 
advertising special brands of clothing, cigars and 
tobacco for the ruralite, let there be signboards just 
as large and just as attractive advertising community 
interests. 

At cross-roads and near railroads let there be 
signs like the following, which tourists may read and 

remember : 

Grundy County 
30oo pure bred herefords 
2000 grade shorthorns 

300 MULES 

10 breeders of plymouth rock chickens 
12 breeders of rhode island reds 
10 breeders of poland china hogs 

Farm Agent, Trenton, Mo. 

McDonough County 
Illinois Township 

60 miles of rock road 
three railroad stations 
high grade fine stock 
75 bushels corn per acre 
tax levy ten mills 
land $75 per acre 

Farm Agent, Macomb, III. 



172 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

Gage County 

two consolidated schools 

one rural high school 

one federated church 

five railroads 

land worth $ioo per acre and selling 

Farm Agent, Beatrice, Neb. 

Marshall County 

fed 300 cars of cattle last year 

it markets $6000 worth of eggs every year 

its land raises 

do bushels of corn per acre 
300 bushels of potatoes per acre 
land worth $qo per acre 

County Agent, Marysville, Kan. 

Jewell County 

land worth $100 per acre 

i acre pastures three cows 

i acre grows three tons alfalfa 

County Agent, Mankato, Kan. 

Such advertising pays or corporations represent- 
ing millions of wealth would not practice such adver- 
tising. The state has hundreds of townships, each 
representing several million dollars invested. Why 
allow these countrysides with all their fertility and 
wealth and beauty to lie unspoken and at the same 
time permit them to be littered and defaced with 
signs promulgating a city's Hog Cholera Serum that 
is inferior to and costs more than that which their 
own agricultural college makes, for the support of 



RURAL COMMUNITY INTEREST 173 

which they pay taxes ; with signs advertising patent 
medicines that do not cure; tobacco that we do not 
want, and lots in the city's " new addition," which is 
no more a part of a city than the land which we 
have in corn ? 

So long as the farmer humbly pursues the policy 
of " Please, what will you give?" and "Please, 
what do you ask? " he will be a burden to himself 
and his sons will be dissatisfied. Cooperation in 
business and cooperation in educational matters and 
legitimate advertising will have a tendency to hold 
those on the farm who are already there and also 
attract to the farm many who are in absolute ignor- 
ance of the one place where life in its greatest fulness 
may be realized. 



CHAPTER XV 
The Closing of School 

No longer in many states do we have a winter 
term of school followed by a spring vacation and a 
summer school. Such was the division of the school 
years at Constad's Crossing. The winter term closed 
about the middle of March, and its closing brought 
back to use the curtain that so successfully hid from 
view the mysteries of Santa Claus and Christmas. 

These exhibitions have been decried by the later- 
day teachers as a waste of much valuable time. The 
criticism may be justified in some cases but in the 
majority of cases it is not. Among fond recollec- 
tions are the wonders of our school exhibitions. We 
had our Irish and German dialect declamations and 
songs; we had dialogues and orations. True, the 
declamation and oration were not strongly differen- 
tiated, but we had them both and everybody liked 
them, and they created quite a little stir locally just 
the same as a school exhibition of the present day 
given under captions of " Senior " and " Junior 
plays." 

It is a most unfortunate condition that has over- 
taken society as regards its entertainment. The 
whole social scheme seems to have changed. In 
many, many ways we have quit home production. 

174 



THE CLOSING OF SCHOOL 175 

Everything must be imported, not only imported 
breakfast foods, imported meats, but imported speak- 
ers, imported singers. Knowing and preaching the 
doctrine of "learning to do by doing," we learn to 
do by " watching others." 

At the present time we are having community 
welfare meetings throughout the state and speakers 
are being imported to address these meetings. The 
people gather, give respectful attention, but that is 
all they give, and unless these people are stirred to 
activity nothing is gained by such meetings. 

I am writing of a real backward step in educa- 
tional and social progress. This backward step is 
being taken in every walk of life. 

The sociologist cries for rural leaders and the city 
and large town are turned over to leaders — every per- 
formance is an all-star affair — stars in the school — 
stars in the church — stars in the college. The in- 
dividual who is but average looks passively on and 
learns to do by watching under the guidance and 
inspiration of an " all-star team." This book is 
written in the interests of the rural school, and while 
the rural school has much to strive for there is much 
included in present day accomplishment that it is 
well to avoid. 

High ideals are beautiful and helpful, but help- 
ful only when people are led into action, The old 
school exhibition is not considered from a literary 



176, THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

or artistic standpoint par excellence. The games we 
once did play, for example, town-ball, in which we 
chose up, giving first choice to the one whose hand 
came out on top of the bat if it were a round bat, or if 
flat, to the one who guessed lucky two out of three on 
wet or dry, were not, scientifically considered, up to 
present day games. But what of the results? 

Who will dare say that the benefits from the 
games were not as great when all played as to-day 
when the school is represented by a team in whose 
interests the entire play activity of the school has 
been sacrificed ? Notwithstanding that the game has 
reached a high degree of perfection, is the growing 
child benefited by an activity in which he has no part 
except to parrot-like scream the " Ricketty, Ricketty 
Jams " at such designated times as are deemed ex- 
pedient by the leader? In the old school exhibition 
everyone had some part and every mother's boy 
and every mother's girl did best and they were all 
stars, and all very happy over their success, and their 
happiness and success lasted till the next school ex- 
hibition. Who will dare argue that the benefit was 
less great than that which comes with our closing 
events of school to-day when boys and girls make of 
the occasion a dress affair which few can afford, and 
import a speaker who does the orating and declaim- 
ing while the class sits with folded hands amid palms, 
ferns and cut flowers listlessly awaiting formal con- 



THE CLOSING OF SCHOOL 177 

gratulations for something to which they have con- 
tributed no more than have the forms in the show 
windows of a ladies' furnishing store contributed to 
the business management. 

Throughout my writing I have felt in a pleasant 
frame of mind and have looked upon the present as 
better than the past, and I have a profound confidence 
in future educational progress ; but there are certain 
danger places which we should avoid, and which I 
fear we are not avoiding. We have been, and are, 
educating part of our people superlatively, and letting 
the millions go untrained. There is too great a ten- 
dency in our common schools and high schools to 
get away from the individual, and universal educa- 
tion will never come if we do not avoid this tendency. 
In a subsequent chapter I have written on the 
importance of play. So much is being said on that 
subject that there is a temptation to omit it from 
those subjects that are considered essential. But 
when I see leading educators, or rather men in posi- 
tions that call for leading educators, reducing their 
schools to mere machines, keeping children for four 
and five hours without opportunity to relax, much 
less play, sacrificing childhood in the interests of 
classification and violating thereby the most sacred 
laws of child hygiene, I feel it a duty to protest in the 
interests of the welfare of the future American man 
and woman. I am far from being optimistic over the 
12 



178 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

outlook. In the mad desire to excel and to do things 
exceptionally well, we are sacrificing in every walk 
of life the masses, and only the individual who does 
exceptionally well is given recognition or even an 
opportunity to become exceptional. Any system that 
loses sight of the individual is bad, regardless of 
organization effected. Many new plans have much 
to commend them, but conditions under which they 
operate must be considered. 

The exhibition at the close of the winter term in 
a measure denoted our year's success. From the 
beginning of the preparation till the final act the 
best of feeling prevailed. Everyone deported himself 
with satisfaction to himself and to his community. 

After a two weeks' vacation the summer school 
opened, and was conspicuous for the absence of all 
of the larger boys. 

The summer school was uneventful and uninter- 
esting. The opportunities for good work were there, 
but I was unaware of their presence, and had I been 
aware of them I could not have taken advantage of 
them. 

The middle of June brought it all to a close, and 
in this I had ample opportunity for exercising mana- 
gerial ability in establishing a centre for a larger 
community by bringing together on Indian Creek 
near Constad's Crossing five schools for a last day 
picnic. 



THE CLOSING OF SCHOOL 179 

The idea was new and very popular. Since we 
were its originators we had another school call a 
meeting of the teachers to discuss plans. After 
effecting an organization composed of the five teach- 
ers and one assistant from each school district, we 
were ready for business. Each school became re- 
sponsible for its part of the program, and each 
school was to practice a song in which all would join. 

A large sawmill located near the picnic grounds 
loaned us lumber for a platform and for seats, and 
the teams and men for handling the lumber were 
many more than needed. Two of the districts had 
" brass bands " and each volunteered its services and 
was accepted. The day was ideal and for miles in 
all directions farm work was suspended and a holiday 
declared. So great was the enthusiasm that a 
" stand ' was maintained, at Which were kept ice 
cream, lemonade and candy. 

Have you become so blase as not to appreciate 
the possibilities for a good time with such oppor- 
tunities as are offered by a country picnic, two brass 
bands and a stand! Of course, the grounds were in 
a bend of the creek — that's what bends in creeks are 
for. It is in these bends that the trees grow the 
largest and that the grass grows the greenest, and it 
is just beyond these bends that are found the riffles, 
and it is in these riffles that the barefoot children 
love most to be, where the mothers and grandmothers 



180 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

cast longing glances and wish they were children just 
for a day. Under the elms on a high bank of Indian 
Creek was built our platform, and it was no small 
platform, but was large enough for two brass bands 
— large enough for all the schools when they sang. It 
was so large that it seemed limitless to the boys and 
girls who alone and unaided made pilgrimages across 
when they spoke their pieces, and spoke them so low 
as to be unheard even by themselves. 

The program was divided into two parts — fore- 
noon and afternoon. The noon hours from twelve 
to two were not written down as a part of the pro- 
gram, but they were a part, and to be exact I should 
say the program was divided into three parts. My 
recollection of the dinner is not distinct. I remember 
the seats were used for tables and that there was no 
grouping off, but that several hundred people, old, 
middle aged and young, occupied places at those 
tables and that everyone had his dinner, and that 
lemonade by the bucketful was furnished free with 
the name of the giver withheld. I could without 
danger of going far wrong tell just what we had to 
eat. Of course, there would be light rolls and jelly, 
new beets and new cucumber pickles and spring 
chicken and every kind of cake and cherry pie, but 
what we had is really of small importance, and then 
it was quite a while ago. The principal points are 
that we had a good dinner, a big dinner, that every- 



THE CLOSING OF SCHOOL 181 

one had all he needed, and that twelve baskets would 
not have held what was left over. Everyone had a 
good time, visited with his neighbor and ate with 
him, and loved him and forgot that his neighbor 
belonged to the Methodist Church or to no church at 
all, demonstrating long before the idea of " The 
School as a Social Centre " was born that the 
school represents the only really democratic institu- 
tion under the protection of the Stars and Stripes. 
The programs were successes. Nothing said or 
given from that platform was particularly good, but 
I have seen many programs since that day that were 
no better, and paradoxical as it seems, I never saw a 
poor program given by home talent. We see children 
every Sunday in Sunday school giving recitations 
and verses — nothing worth while. Am I forgetting ? 
Yes, they are all worth while. They are ours. They 
are doing things, — things really worth while. I have 
seen teachers and parents mortified over the fact 
that a child forgot his piece. The only care that 
should be had is the effect that failure may have upon 
the child — it tried — it faced an audience, and it re- 
quired courage to do that; it succeeded even though 
its teeth burned its lips, its throat went dry and the 
audience went round and round. Give us a greater 
sympathy for childhood and a greater appreciation of 
the dangers of an arrested development, and let us 
put children to doing and keep them doing all through 



182 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

the period of adolescence, and quit importing all-star 
companies. 

The man and woman who would not rather hear 
their own children speak and sing are unnatural and 
should not have children. The man and woman who 
are not for the home team in preference to the 
professional players have not felt the joy of being a 
neighbor. The program for the day closed with a song 
by the five schools. Of course, we had to open with 
America, and (not "of course " but we did) close 
with Onward Christian Soldiers, and we sang it 
much better than on the opening morning. Although 
no one was invited to the front there was one who 
came, uninvited and unannounced, but not unwel- 
come. He stood in the middle of the platform 
among the children of the five schools and with the 
last word he raised his hand to still the crowd that 
was already quiet. In strong, clear tones he pro- 
nounced a benediction upon his neighbors' children, 
upon the teachers and upon the neighbors themselves, 
and then "school was out." Another year of oppor- 
tunities had passed and Big Indian Creek, a concrete 
representation of living humanity, moved onward by 
irresistible forces to the place whence it came. Old 
Indian flows on. I visited her but a short time ago. 

It was in the autumn, The trees were yet un- 
marred by the farmer's axe. The hollyhocks seemed 
just the same, and the murmuring sounds from the 



THE CLOSING OF SCHOOL 183 

springhouse brought back memories — memories 
sweet, memories sacred. Memories of happy days — 
of responsibility, hope — memories of dear friends. 
Father Rose, who died a few years after the time of 
which this story was written, was survived by Mother 
Rose by several years. In the cemetery among the 
hills they both lie buried, and an unpretentious marble 
gives dates of their births and deaths, and nothing 
more. 

To my mind came the w T ords as I stood by their 
graves, " They are not dead. When that marble has 
fallen and the names are unknown to the oldest resi- 
dent, the Constad Crossing neighborhood will be 
better because it was once the home of Father and 
Mother Rose." 

Mr. Denman feeds the pigs and works the garden, 
helps Kansas with her children and her chickens and 
her cows, and complains of high taxes. 

Mollie is the mother of several boys and girls, 
and her boys are all teachers and their mother never 
tires of telling them of her ideal teacher. 

To Mr. Constad the twenty-five years have 
brought their changes. He no longer rides horseback 
over his farm, but drives a touring car of high power. 
He drives it as though life were escaping and must 
be overtaken. He talks not of the past. None but 
the old live in the past. Constad will never grow old. 
When he is gone a man who is but ordinary can't 



184 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

take his place. A man who is unmerciful, who loves 
not his neighbor, who loves to do alms before men 
to be seen of them, who loves to pray standing in the 
synagogues and on the corners of the street and 
thinks he is heard for his much speaking, will not do. 
But his place will be filled. Such men do not live in 
vain. These men of character are the human guide- 
posts along life's roadways. They point the way to 
the travellers who are footsore, weak and discour- 
aged, to those who are hopeful, anxious and am- 
bitious and who at times are tempted to turn from 
the great White Way to the dark danger routes that 
lead to disappointment and failure. Yes, his place 
will be filled — more than filled. 

The world grows better, safer, sweeter, and for 
this growth it owes a great debt to the rural school, 
the rural church. Who would have the courage or 
be so forgetful of their great work as to say that 
they have lived in vain? 

What more impressive painting could the artist 
paint than one of the little one-room schoolhouse, 
" The Bethel of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Cen- 
turies " ? 



CHAPTER XVI 
A School Responsibility 

One moral question far-reaching in its effect 
upon rural life, harder to solve than a like one affect- 
ing city life, is the unsupervised time of the child. 

An enemy to the public school remarked that the 
public school is the social cesspool. " We have in the 
world families that are depraved, vicious and vulgar. 
With our compulsory school laws we compel, for the 
good of society at large, children from such families 
to be brought into contact with children who are 
carefully trained, and whose morals are good, who 
have pure minds filled with wholesome thoughts. 
We compel the cultured and refined child to associa- 
ate with the uncultured and impure. Our schools are 
a moral uplift for the delinquent child, but what 
about their effect upon the other child ? Is it treating 
the morally clean child right to force upon it an 
association at its most impressionable age that is cer- 
tain to work a real injury? " 

These are questions of serious importance. In 
this regard our schools will not be changed. It is 
right that the child of unfortunate home conditions 
be given every opportunity for proper development, 
and that he be adjusted to conditions under which he 
will eventually live. 

185 



186 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

In considering his welfare let us not forget the 
child of the more fortunate home. Let us, in other 
words, keep all we have and endeavor to get more. 
The careful mother watches her children's associates 
and does not hesitate to rescue her children from 
those known to be evil and vicious. The school, upon 
receiving these children, becomes " parent in charge " 
and assumes an obligation to watch over their moral 
welfare. 

This obligation involves many things. First of 
all, there must be teachers wise in the ways of the 
world. They must be people of high ideals. If they 
are not, the children are better off at home. A 
thousand things must be known by the efficient 
teacher. He must know boys and girls. He must be 
able to detect viciousness and must be quick to 1 guard 
against it. He must be ever on the alert, during 
school hours and during intermission. 

Many teachers never consider the question of 
morals in arranging the seating of a school. They 
thoughtlessly permit a bad girl to sit where her in- 
fluence is the worst possible; permit a boy of the 
lowest morals to sit where he can corrupt the morals 
of others and offer insults to girls without detection. 

These are matters concerning which no book rules 
can be given. The teacher must have common sense 
and a willingness to use it. The teacher cannot 
handle a large school and sit for hours behind his 



A SCHOOL RESPONSIBILITY 187 

desk. He must know what is happening and he must 
feel that it makes a difference. 

Some years ago a mother called upon a member 
of the school board, asking that her daughter have 
her seat changed, stating that she then sat just across 
the aisle from a bad boy who made vulgar and 
insinuating remarks. The board member told her to 
consult the teacher. She replied that she had, but that 
the teacher had refused her request, stating that her 
daughter was entitled to no special privileges. The 
board member peremptorily ordered the teacher to 
place that boy where he could offer no indignities to 
decent pupils, and if she could not do this, to suspend 
him at once. The morals of the school must be 
protected. 

During intermission the plays should be super- 
vised. There are many good reasons for this, but the 
only one considered here is the moral one. 

Children going long distances, over lonely roads, 
need supervision, and the adult person is of unusual 
experience if he does not know why. There are 
many reasons, but the reason now considered is a 
moral one. 

Supervised play, and supervision going to and 
returning from school, is a more difficult matter in 
rural than in town schools. 

To some teachers supervision is distasteful. They 
place it along with surveillance. They are willing to 



188 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

" trust " their children, and such teachers who are 
mixtures of stupidity and credulity, work irreparable 
injury. This is an age of supervision and strict 
accounting. As well argue that a cash register is a 
challenge of one's morals. Carelessness in business 
methods makes rogues, and carelessness in child man- 
agement either in the home or the school makes for 
imperfection. The wise teacher and wise parent will 
not wilfully disregard the temptations for wrong 
action that are often placed before children. 

These are matters that caused me great uneasi- 
ness during my first school. The journey to and 
from school is one over which the teacher can have 
but little control. The law recognizes the gravity of 
this matter and gives the teacher and parent concur- 
rent jurisdiction over the child from the time he 
leaves home till he returns home, but this does not 
insure safety from the vicious children. 

There are many who are favorably located, where 
distances are short or where morals are clean, but 
there are those who have long distances to travel, and 
who are forced to be with those who are immoral, 
and it is for them that a care must be exercised. 



CHAPTER XVII 
Mistakes 

I have said that one mistake I made was at- 
tempting to teach. This opinion is strengthened as 
I measure the results of my work during that first 
year. As I view my work of that period I am satis- 
fied that few teachers ever did much poorer teaching, 
notwithstanding our grand finale and my offer of 
re-employment at the highest salary paid in the rural 
schools of the county. One consolation I have found 
in that year's work is that I have been, in later years, 
better able to detect weaknesses in teaching, for I 
was guilty of all of them and know their results. 

At the beginning of my work in a city school 
some years ago the following incident occurred. I 
shall faithfully recite it for the benefit of my readers, 
believing that many will recognize in it a personal 
experience. 

A father of children in my school called me into 
his place of business and said : " You are a stranger 
to me, but I have a trouble and I hope you can help 
me out of it. It may sound harsh to you to hear me 
say it, but I have a son, twenty-two years old, who is 
absolutely worthless. I am a poor man and have 
five children, all of whom I desire to educate and 

189 



190 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

make self-supporting. This son of whom I speak 
has never been a good student. He never learned 
very well, and the worst of it is, he never tried. 
Last year I sent him to a business college and last 
month he came home with his diploma. I got him 
a position with an old friend of mine in a neighbor- 
ing town. Yesterday he came home. He came 
because he was discharged. I tell you, Professor, 
he is no good. Now what I Want you to do, as our 
superintendent and as a man who is interested in 
young people and anxious to help them succeed in 
life, is to see him, talk to him, look him over, gain 
his confidence, and try to fix him so he can pass the 
teachers' examination, so that he can teach school. 
I know where he can get a school if he can procure 
a certificate." 

I met this son, talked with him, and looked him 
over, but fear I did not gain his confidence. He was 
evidently not impressed with the seriousness of the 
teaching business. He undertook it, however, and, 
although he teaches but one term in a place, he al- 
ways manages to be self-supporting, but, it is to be 
feared, at the expense of a childhood that is in no 
way responsible for the father's five children, the 
shortcomings of his son, nor for the father's con- 
suming desire to make his children self-supporting. 

Such crimes as the foregoing are directly charge- 
able to the system under which our rural schools oper- 



MISTAKES 191 

ate. The system not only makes such cases possible, 
but it makes possible the worst results imaginable 
for such cases. If such teachers could be supervised 
they might be tolerated and they might be made of 
some use and some of their mistakes eliminated, but 
under the present small district system their oppor- 
tunity for destructive work is almost unlimited. 

The case cited is a double criticism on our 
schools. The school is responsible for this young 
man's condition, and a school that makes such misfits 
will continue to make them so long as it persists in 
hiring misfits for teachers. 

Through a supposed kindness of heart boards 
hire such teachers ; but kindness of heart and sane- 
ness of mind are far from, being in evidence when 
such teachers are perpetrated upon a helpless child- 
hood from which the opportunities of youth are 
withheld. 

Such teachers as the one just described are often 
hired by well-meaning boards, not for the purpose of 
giving the teachers employment, but because the 
children in their school are small and not far ad- 
vanced, and can, therefore, be taught by a teacher 
who has not made much preparation. These boards 
are certainly most ignorant concerning the necessary 
qualifications of a good primary or intermediate 
grade teacher. How good it makes the superinten- 
dent feel to have his board say, " Get us the very 



192 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

best teachers for the primary department that you 
can find." 

There is one unfailing sign of a poor school, of 
an inefficient board, and of a superintendent who is 
either incompetent or without influence with his 
board, and that is a school where the primary teacher 
is not the strongest and highest paid teacher in the 
grades. How many thousands of small district 
schools are being taught to-day by young teachers 
without any professional preparation whatever and 
with a very limited education, just because " the 
children are small and anyone can teach them." 

The first mistake that I shall briefly consider was 
my method of teaching the primary grades. In con- 
sideration of the several methods of teaching be- 
ginners to read we are impressed with the merits of 
the sentence method, the word method, and the 
phonic method and the alphabet method. The last 
one was the only method I had heard of, but it was 
not the only one of which I made use. 

First we learned the letters of the alphabet. 
This in itself is no small task, and if there is a sub- 
jective interest in learning the alphabet it is so hidden 
as to have escaped detection, and the only objective 
interest that the child can have in it is that of mastery 
and a possible desire for approbation. It was a hard 
task for pupils to learn all those twenty-six letters 



MISTAKES 193 

and by learning them they acquired a real incum- 
brance. 

By way of illustration I mention a few of the 
words undertaken immediately after the alphabet was 
learned. It will be remembered that in learning the 
alphabet we did not learn the several sounds for 
which a letter stands. In the word a-t, at; d-o-g, 
dog; we have the short sounds of "a" and " o," 
and a knowledge of the alphabet was no possible 
help there. H-o-r-s-e, horse, involves five letters 
with a natural sound of " r " and the soft " c " or 
soft " s." Again we are at a loss for argument to 
defend the necessity for, or the advisability of having 
at this time the alphabet. In the first reader then 
in use, on page 5 occurred the word " tomatoes.'' 
Some of my pupils who were able to visualize mas- 
tered the intricacies of that word, but others were 
tasked to the limit and then all did not master it. 
If the word method had been advocated in those 
days it would have received little consideration, and 
yet it was the word method which we finally used, 
although in our ignorance we did not know it. We 
had them spell " at," " dog," " horse/' " tomatoes," 
etc., and in the end told them what these words were. 
The power of the letter meant nothing to them what- 
ever and was a real hindrance. 

In comparing that blundering practice (it was no 
method) with some of the modern methods, one 
13 



194 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

cannot but sympathize with the children of former 
days, or with children of the present day who are 
taught by teachers who have not made special prepa- 
ration for their work. It is not the purpose of this 
chapter to give in detail any of the methods for teach- 
ings but to give a few of the practices that were and 
are yet employed by those who attempt to teach those 
subjects for which they have made no preparation. 
(So long as school teaching is used as a stepping 
stone for those who are ambitious, and so long as 
many who have no ambitions, and those who fail in 
all other undertakings, and those who are unable to 
compete with men and women in other walks of life 
drift into the teaching business, we may expect prac- 
tices that are positively vicious to the best interests 
of education. So long as we have the present 
methods of employing teachers this condition will 
prevail. So long as we have school boards of three 
men to employ the teachers for the children of every 
ten or twelve families, and these boards must be 
taken from these families, we can expect no great 
improvement. The system is vicious and with it 
cheap, inefficient teachers are sure of employment, 
and education will suffer.) 

As stated, the power of the letter was not con- 
sidered. The pupil was taught the names of the 
letters without regard to their function, built them 



MISTAKES 195 

into meaningless combinations and called these com- 
binations words after being told the words. 

A trained primary teacher can easily accomplish 
more in nine days than I accomplished wkh my little 
people in nine months, and I worked hard, even 
though blunderingly. 

Reading is an art, but teaching reading is a 
science. This is especially true of teaching reading 
to beginners. It has been said that " the child learns 
to read by reading." This is but the thought, differ- 
ently worded, that " we learn to do by doing " ; but 
modern education has added " under the guidance 
and inspiration of true ideals." There is an educa- 
tional maxim to which close heed must be given in 
the presentation of this subject, and that is " to pro- 
ceed from the known to the related unknown." 

The expert primary teachers make use of the 
sentence, the word, and the phonetic method, but 
their greatest success lies in the close relation that 
they maintain between what the child knows and 
what he is about to be taught. The method I em- 
ployed was almost without merit. I tried to lead 
the child from what he did not know to the unrelated 
unknown, and since I violated all the principles of 
sound pedagogy it will not be surprising to state 
that my primary pupils made little progress. 

For the second and third and other grades I 
made use of the word method in the reading. I 



196 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

knew nothing of the mechanics of reading. I had 
not learned that pitch, force, quality, expression, 
etc., can be secured only by making them the out- 
come of an appreciation of thought and feeling. The 
matter of a " proper atmosphere " for good reading 
was not one of the things I had considered. I pointed 
to work on the board that was to be read one word at 
a time, a practice which will make poor readers of 
already good readers. 

" Grouping " was unknown to me. If I wanted 
them to read " The Death of Absalom " or " Little 
Nell/' I read it for them, affecting a mournful tone, 
and required them to imitate me. This wlas very 
poor teaching. They usually read it as well under 
such preparation as they sang on the opening morn- 
ing of school. I did not know then that a pupil who 
knows the words in the selection of " Little Nell " 
cannot read it poorly if the proper atmosphere exists. 
In short, my reading exercises were very poor. I did 
not teach those to read who did not know how to 
read, and I did not make those who could read better 
readers. 

I have an idea that I did one commendable thing 
that had a direct bearing upon their reading. I put at 
the disposal of the school those books that I felt cer- 
tain they would like. The first book of which I was 
personally fond was " Robinson Crusoe." That 
was the first book that I put on the teacher's desk 



MISTAKES 197 

for the boys. Next tO' get in beside this book was 
" Joan of Arc." " Neighbors with Wings and 
Fins," " Flyers, Creepers and Swimmers," nor any 
of the Seton Thompson books were published at that 
time; but Old Mother Hubbard, Mother Goose 
Rhymes, Little Red Riding Hood, yEsop's Fables, 
were right up beside Robinson Crusoe — sometimes, 
but generally none were on my desk, and these six 
books always went home with the children at night. 
I originated one thing which was full of merit — 
a reading board. I had a board about two feet wide 
and six feet long upon which I posted newspaper and 
magazine clippings. We kept a can of paste ever in 
readiness, and all contributions of interest or merit 
that were sent in found a place. The merit of the 
reading board was evidenced very largely by the in- 
creased " interest " in reading. 

Many have acquired an interest in history 
through reading historical romance and an interest 
in theology through Bible stories ; in industrial work 
through manual training, home economics, domestic 
science and domestic art; and in sanitation, not by 
the stressing of active attention to the subject as 
presented in the physiology of twenty-five years ago, 
but through a recognition of its vital importance as 
applied to modern day living. 

On the reading board was carefully selected 
material, material suited to the various ages of those 



198 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

in school. My first care was to put nothing on it that 
would not be of interest to the child. It was not long 
before there was a general interest in my selections 
and the pupils began to feel that my judgment on 
what to read was good. It goes without dispute that 
we get the reputation for being sound by those with 
whom we agree. However, the teacher must not 
stop here. Here this must be used as an advantage. 
Stories were good for the reading board. A little 
humor was not out of place. The teacher who 
thinks these things are all right is likely to be pro- 
nounced all right himself by the children, and when 
I later began to add a news item to my selection, it, 
too, was read, and before the winter was half 
over the older pupils were bringing clippings of the 
current events, and these clippings multiplied so 
rapidly that a reading board for current events be- 
came one separate and distinct reading board. What 
a satisfaction was that reading board ! Not only was 
it popular with the people, it was popular with the 
teacher. It was his. He had invented it. Surely 
this was a case of a want being the mother of 
invention. In this community where there was little 
to read he was given an opportunity to do what 
to-day would be little appreciated. This board had 
one great point in its favor, and that was that all it 
contained had been censored. 

My greatest satisfaction was in the change that 



MISTAKES 199 

I was able to create in Father Rose. He became my 
best reader. Many evenings after school he would 
come in and read our clippings from the read- 
ing board. My papers came regularly and he read 
them regularly. One night I saw him reading from 
a volume of my Macaulay's History of England. I 
think there were five volumes, and Father Rose read 
them all. Among my books was Irving's " Knicker- 
bocker's History of New York." Father Rose not 
only read that book, but he read it aloud to Mother 
Rose, and I believe he gave me credit for Irving's 
success as a writer; at least, he gave me the praise 
for bringing some of the good things into his life. 
A man can be known by what he reads. 

How do I harmonize his attitude toward these 
books with his former attitude when he said that 
reading interfered with his religious enjoyment? 
This is an easy question. Father Rose had a good, 
clean mind. The reading that he had been so un- 
fortunate as to know much about, excepting his 
Bible, had nothing to commend itself to him. It was 
dry and lacking in human interest. Irving's descrip- 
tions of those good, hard working, thrifty, honest 
Dutch people struck responsive chords in this old 
man's heart that had waited all these years for the 
sweep of the hand of that master teller of tales. 

So often have I found this great principle in 
education violated, the fundamental principle or law 



200 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

of teaching, that " knowledge can be taught only by 
occasioning proper activities in the learner's mind/' 
Learning is the legitimate offspring of interest and 
interest demands a changing environment. 

Mistakes in teaching arithmetic were not as 
numerous as those that I made in teaching reading, 
a thing which was largely due to the fact that I had 
fewer opportunities for making them. My school 
was large and the more advanced pupils were allowed 
to work at their problems with less interruption than 
would have been the case had the school been smaller. 
Indeed, I have seen schools in very recent years 
whose great handicap was the time that the teacher 
had in which she might help her pupils. 

One of the weak places in our graded schools is 
the so-called supervised study periods, during which 
time the teacher removes all obstacles and, with the 
obstacles, an opportunity for getting an education. 

" To occasion the proper activity in the learner's 
mind " is' the work of an expert. The teacher who 
turns the study period into one of slavery for herself 
and of mental passivity for the pupil is committing a 
radical error. 

How few teachers there are who seem to realize 
that the success of a school depends upon what the 
pupil does rather than upon what the teacher does. 
My mind is not clear as to the attitude of the public 
on this point. In many places I believe the success 



MISTAKES 201 

of a school is measured by the activity on the part of 
the teacher rather than upon the mental activities of 
the pupils. 

Many teachers have the reputation of being good 
teachers because they are considerate of pupils, be- 
cause they take such pains in making everything 
plain, clear, etc. Such a recommendation is a 
doubtful compliment. " Pupils learn to do by doing 
under the inspiration and guidance of true ideals." 
At the other extreme is the teacher who does nothing. 
While possibly less detrimental than the teacher who 
does it all, verily she has her reward. Her reward 
is a consciousness of having " let them work it out 
for themselves," and while she may never know it, 
such liberality cannot be classed as teaching. 

Not everyone that sayeth " Lord, Lord " shall 
enter the kingdom, and not every pupil who repeats 
what is said to him is thinking. 

With our boasted progress in education I am of 
the opinion that the present year finds no great 
increase in the number of independent thinkers. We 
have a class of educators to-day who hide or attempt 
to hide their inefficiencies by deriding any effort at 
sound building. They immediately cry, " Impracti- 
cal, junk, rubbish." If the problem is sufficiently 
varied from the one had in class to call for a little 
independence in thought it is nothing but a catch 
problem, and, therefore, obviously unfair. Mental 



202 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

arithmetic, which once held a prominent place in our 
schools, has been abolished these many years, except 
in the primary grades, and technical grammar is with 
us only in name. The young man and young woman 
of the present are not amenable to discipline, and it 
shows up in more places than in their attitude toward 
the authority which is intended for their control. 

There has been more or less controversy during 
the past few years concerning formal discipline, 
whether or not one subject carries over into another. 
It is not my purpose to answer that question, but 
simply to say habit carries over; character and an 
education that makes character that is purposeless 
carries over and it carries over very badly. The 
college will not make a thinker of a student who has 
never done any thinking before he gets into college, 
and the lamentable fact about it all is that the schools 
of the best reputation — those most thoroughly or- 
ganized — frequently do the least to bring about a 
better mental attitude. 

In visiting a school where the teacher had each 
alternate period for helping pupils I found a most 
happy condition. In all the grades of that school 
the teachers were meeting with the unanimous ap- 
proval of the pupils. The teachers so far as I was 
able to observe were hard working, painstaking men 
and women. They were continually on the go. 
When one pupil's obstacle had been pulled out of the 



MISTAKES 203 

way and the track sanded, other demands were an- 
swered, more wrecks straightened out and so far 
as I could see all would get through on schedule 
time. As I watched and listened I became inspired 
with the thought that education is after all just 
getting results, just getting answers. The pupils had 
only to obey orders. He could not get his problem ; 
teacher looks and sweetly says, " You have multi- 
plied, dear, instead of dividing." The child divided 
and got the problem. What more could be desired ? 
One pupil asks, " Should it be he and me or him and 
I ? " The teacher, who has a fine knowledge of the 
English language but no use for " formal grammar," 
says, " Always he and I, dear '" — and another mile- 
stone slipped by. With this same teacher I talked. 
I asked her how much formal grammar was at- 
tempted in her school. She frowned and said, " Very 
little, we don't believe in it." I asked the principal 
the same question. He said, " Well, we pretend to 
do a little," but, lowering his voice, he said, " Be- 
tween you and I, I haven't no use for formal gram- 
mar." I heartily agree with any teacher who de- 
nounces formal anything if divorced from thought, 
but we shall never have English students that can 
use correct English who do not think, any more than 
we can have mathematics students who* are worth 
while that do not think. Rules that take precedence 



204 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

over thought are destructive of the best things in 
education. 

Rules intelligently applied are, without question, 
useful. We cannot do without them. They have 
their proper place, but that place is not to be used 
to the exclusion of thought. 

Product divided by the multiplier gives multipli- 
cand is a rule, and has its application in the fact 
that percentage divided by rate gives base, or area 
of a square divided by length gives width, R 2 times 
pi equals the area of a circle is a good rule, and the 
individual who applies the rule will arrive at the cor- 
rect result as soon as the one who knows the reason 
lying back of the rule, and for the solution of a prob- 
lem involving square or cube root the fellow with the 
rule will be as efficient in the particular solution as 
the one who has thought out all the principles in- 
volved in the processes. The volume of a parallelo- 
piped is easily obtained by application of the rule, 
simply multiplying the area of a cross section by the 
altitude or by multiplying together the three dimen- 
sions. The rules are all right, but 'by some teachers 
the rule is emphasized and thought is little or not at 
all exercised. The result of such teaching is gener- 
ally disappointing. 

The rule teacher and the rule pupil are not de- 
pendable people. They are not the ones whom we 
would select to work for us under conditions of 



MISTAKES 205 

various or of irregular presentations, or where the 
statement of the conditions is presented in an irregu- 
lar form. It was not in a rural school that I saw 
young men who were supposed to have had a fairly- 
decent exposure to high school, and to more than 
freshman college work, go down before a problem 
that involved no greater mathematical puzzle than 
what must 2 be multiplied by to make 6. Mind, I 
do not say that the above problem was propounded 
to a college student, but the problem involved that 
principle and no' other; the exact problem being " 64 
is what per cent, of 512 " or interpreted, " How many 
5.12's in 64? ' The same student has never had any 
trouble with his English. 24 is how many times 6 
would not appeal to a high school senior as a real 
man problem, and yet he is 50 per cent, likely to 
miss finding out what part J4 might be of %. 

In an eastern state one of the good men teachers, 
" unusually successful teachers," so-called, worked 
every problem in any arithmetic that had rules. He 
would have been thoroughly incensed if anyone had 
asked him out of curiosity to find the volume of a 
parallelopiped, or how to find the number of bushels 
of corn in a crib or tons of hay in a stack; but he 
told a member of his board who wanted to know 
where to run a partition in the crib to make one bin 
holding 100 bushels of seed corn that there was no 
rule for that kind of work; that one could figure 



206 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

contents of a crib easily, but he necessarily must 
have the crib before he can tell exactly what it holds. 
With him we can have no> serious disagreement. 

In higher mathematics rules and formulas are 
necessary, but rules not based upon laboratory ex- 
perience have no place in elementary or secondary 
education. 

The case of the young man who could not tell 
what per cent. 64 is of 512 aptly illustrates the 
neglect of every teacher who let him ride through 
on a rule. 

There is a sentiment among teachers from the 
first primary up that exists among piece workers, 
that "I'll do my own work and no more," and if a 
teacher finds a pupil lacking in preparation for her 
subject to disclaim responsibility and wash her 
hands. But the student gets very little that is really 
helpful from such disposition of responsibilities. 

For the student I want to express a real sym- 
pathy. It is not his fault entirely nor largely, but 
the fault lies in poor teaching; every teacher who 
ever had that boy in class and did not help him to 
think has contributed to his condition. I would 
have it understood that I have not selected a student 
who is not average in intellect. He is an average 
and he is the direct result of an educational practice, 
extending over and into every subject which calls 
for exactness and thought. The mere repetition of 



MISTAKES 207 

words has no place in the acquiring of knowledge or 
adding to the clearness of knowledge. 

It is not my desire to criticise our schools and our 
teachers too harshly, but we must require more in- 
dependence in thought if we would educate. I have 
sometimes doubted the efficiency of the ordinary 
recitation. The pupils who are able to solve certain 
problems put them on the board or read them from 
their papers. Those who cannot solve them see how 
they are solved and at the same time are robbed of 
another opportunity of helping themselves. I be- 
lieve the recitation that is given up to pioneering is 
the most beneficial. 

In some states arithmetics have been adopted be- 
cause of their most excellent rules and of their most 
excellently solved problems. More virtue has been 
claimed for the rules than for subject matter. An 
arithmetic that required thought or practical demon- 
stration soon became the ridicule of the press and 
competing book companies, and of teachers who 
couldn't work the problems because of the absence 
of model problems and workable rules. 

The lack of thought is one of the glaring defects 
in modern education. Some have the opinion that 
our students are more deficient in relation to num- 
bers than to language, but I feel qualified to say that 
this is untrue. I have served seventeen years on 
teachers' examining boards, and I account for the 



208 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

verdict that certain individuals are just " fine in 
grammar" but can't learn mathematics by noting 
that grammar teachers are less exacting than the 
mathematics teachers. If they were subjected to the 
same scrutiny and held down to the right and to 
wrong, to the fine distinctions of which our language 
is capable, the verdict would soon go out that " repe- 
tition without thought is the mother of stupidity/' 
whether in language, mathematics, or history. 

One who claims a working knowledge of our 
language and professes ignorance of number rela- 
tions flatly contradicts himself. If the elementary 
and secondary schools emphasized thought exercises 
and thought getting instead of form and formality 
there would be a complete and beneficial revolution 
in our educational system. 

Some educators have insisted upon a set form of 
analyses, but even that is not always evidence of 
thought. While I favor having students go into 
reasons, I do not favor a set analysis for a problem. 
That also has a tendency to destroy originality, and 
like the rule may be accompanied by little or no 
thought. 

Years since my first rural school I met with the 
following condition in a room where the teacher was 
considered strong in teaching arithmetic. She had 
recommended a boy for promotion. The boy's work 
did not meet with the approval of his new teacher. 



MISTAKES 209 

To verify her charges against him she kept him after 
school and had me hear him analyze a problem. His 
former teacher was an " analyzer." Problem : " If 
25 sheep cost $75, what will one sheep cost?" 
Pupil: "If 25 sheep cost $75, one sheep will cost 
25 times $75 or $1875." 

Teacher : " Now, Albert, do you understand that 
problem, or are you just repeating words ? " 

Pupil : " I understand it." 

Teacher : " Albert, please write your analysis on 
the board." 

In the meantime his former teacher was sent for 
and was present when Albert, in his proudest tones, 
read from the board, " If 25 sheep cost $75, one sheep 
will cost 25 times $75 or $1875 " (and with a coup 
de grace he added), " because 25 sheep are 25 times 
as many sheep as one sheep." 

At once his former teacher pounced upon him 
with, " Why, Albert, don't you know you'd divide 
in a problem like that? " Like a game fish that is 
away with bait, hook, line and rod, Albert bolted the 
problem by the division route and his teacher smiled 
complaisantly while remarking, " Albert needs only 
a suggestion. I never knew a brighter boy than 
Albert." Former teacher was a great favorite. 
Albert never had any trouble while in her room. 
Albert's new teacher suffered by comparison. She 
couldn't make Albert's work plain for him, and until 
14 



210 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

Albert is considerably older he will not know that 
his former teacher, although honest at heart, was a 
miserable failure. 

The English round tables wail, " What's the mat- 
ter with our high school English?" The superin- 
tendents of the state are wailing at the higher insti- 
tutions and asking, " Why do you not give us good 
English teachers? " A professor of history within 
the last year said he sometimes wished high schools 
did not teach history, for as it was they only hindered 
the university work. " But," he said, " since any- 
one can get past in teaching it in high school, uni- 
versity prepared teachers are no longer specializing 
in history, because it is usually taught by the home 
girls who usually have to be taken care of." 

The mathematics teacher wails louder than all 
the others, for he is up against the stone wall. He 
can't get past without the thought, and since he is 
almost alone in his efforts his burden is a most 
grievous one. In the grades, high school and college, 
the mathematics teacher who does his work con- 
scientiously is like the really good man, likely to be 
very lonesome, unless he be one of those dear, good 
men who makes it all so clear that there is nothing 
left for the student to see. 

I know the college estimate of the average high 
school student, and I know the high school princi- 
pal's estimate of this same average student after he 



MISTAKES 211 

has been passed through college. It's a shifting of 
responsibilities from the kindergarten to college and 
from college to the kindergarten, and still the evil 
goes on. It is probably true that nowhere along the 
line has the teacher had a chance to do good work, 
for all along the route immature minds are con- 
fronted with work beyond them. Number relations 
are attempted too early in life, and the teacher in 
desperation breaks every rule of pedagogy in ex- 
tracting herself from a dilemma for which she her- 
self is in nowise responsible. She is not permitted 
to spend sufficient time on fundamentals, but is com- 
pelled to make the pupil work faster than his mind 
can be developed. 

Short principles should be thoroughly demon- 
strated before allowing short methods or attempting 
to apply them. Rules should be taught as conclu- 
sions rather than as introductions. Many a pupil 
goes through arithmetic and algebra without know- 
ing why 3 and y^ equals 13/4, or understanding that 
a fraction is an indicated division, or that the reduc- 
tion of a fraction to lower terms is simply dividing 
both divisor and dividend by the same number. 

The work of the mathematics teacher, as I see it, 
is by its very nature entitled to first place in the edu- 
cational curricula and to the mathematics teachers 
must come a deeper conviction that the responsi- 
bility resting upon them is a real one — that there 



2n THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

must be a tightening up rather than a loosening up. 
Into these days of " easy steps to learning' and 
" an education while you wait " must be written the 
words of the old master, who was asked how he 
mixed his paints, " With brains, sir, with brains.'' 

Let every step in mathematics be taken with 
thought. Reduce form and formality to the mini- 
mum, and as for the rule, let it be the sequence or 
summary of lesson taught. 

Estimating my work in geography as to practi- 
cability, I place it very low indeed. I have perfectly 
good reasons for its being so poor. I taught it as it 
had been taught to me. As a student I had never 
studied geography as a science nor in its relation to 
the sciences, nor in its relation to history. To me it 
had been given as a memory drill, and as a memory 
drill I gave it to my pupils. I had received a drill 
on locative geography which was very deficient. I 
well remember some years later, when in St. Louis, 
of being surprised to find the Missouri River not 
flowing into the Mississippi River at that point, and 
that I was as wholly surprised concerning the loca- 
tion of Chicago as I was of its size and importance. 
As to San Francisco, it was a revelation in almost 
every respect. My knowledge of the Mississippi 
River was rather complete, for which I am indebted 
to a close early acquaintance by the name of Huckle- 
berry Finn. 



MISTAKES 213 

Notwithstanding that the Great Lakes and the 
mighty St. Lawrence River 'constitute the largest 
body of fresh water in the world and a waterway of 
great commercial importance and that the tributary 
streams of these inland seas are far from being suffi- 
cient to compensate for evaporation, I was content 
with considering them all as so many names on 
colored paper. Why, from whence, and whither were 
of no concern, and because of undirected notions, I 
was surprised when I, a man, discovered in a trip 
from Buffalo to Montreal that the St. Lawrence 
River flowed into the Atlantic Ocean instead of the 
Great Lakes. 

The largest cities were learned in order of their 
population, but with that we stopped. We named 
the waters bordering upon New England, but why 
there are good harbors there, and why important, 
were insignificant as compared with the fact that the 
capital of Vermont is Montpelier, on the Onion 
River. The effects of glaciation upon New England, 
why New England is not adapted to agriculture, 
what natural conditions and resources led to ship 
building in Maine, and the introduction of the tex- 
tile industries in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and 
Connecticut, were nothing when compared with the 
importance of naming the tributaries of the Cumber- 
land River. 

The mistakes I made were many more than 



214 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

these herein enumerated, and the one compensating 
thought that " I did the best that I knew " affords 
little consolation for the students by whom the op- 
portunities of youth have passed. 

My work in history was not so bad. True, I was 
guilty of stressing quite an array of names and dates, 
but we did not stop there. I never was particularly 
fond of it. I liked to read it, but I did not like to 
outline it and make maps and charts about it. I 
made the mistake of doing some of this map and 
chart work, but since it was not connected very 
closely with the regular work, it did no particular 
harm. 

If a teacher, even though in an irrational way, 
conducts recitations in history for nine months, and 
at the end of that time finds his class interested and 
wanting more, he can hardly be said to have made a 
dismal failure. 

If, on the other hand, the teacher, even though 
in a most rational way, conducts recitations in his- 
tory for nine months, charting, outlining, note- 
booking and mapping the exact location of every 
wheat shock on the Gettysburg field, the house in 
which General Bragg was quartered during the 
battles of Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, 
and the exact location of the road through the 
swamps of Arkansas which the Seminole Indians 
travelled in 1837, and finds his class uninterested and 



MISTAKES 215 

detesting the very name history, he can hardly be 
said to have made a shining success. 

Critics of such teaching condone the offense by 
saying that such teachers shoot over the heads of 
their pupils. To a teacher who has not caught the 
real spirit of a historian, who has never had a his- 
toric conception, it is a mystery why after all his 
majoring he can manage to destroy all interest and 
enthusiasm, and many times leave the pupil who 
once had an interest in the subject in a really antag- 
onistic mood. In no subject does the personal equa- 
tion of the teacher mean more than in history. No 
student is in school long enough to get much history, 
but if he be given a liking for the subject he will 
pursue the study through life. To instill within the 
learner's mind an interest in the career of nations 
should be the ambition of every teacher of history. 
But why elaborate upon history? The principle 
underlying the successful teaching of history holds 
good for the successful teaching of all school sub- 
jects. To care why and to know why constitute an 
indissoluble relationship, which the real teacher will 
never fail to establish. 



CHAPTER XVIII 
Music, Stories and Play 

A few years ago in a very sparsely settled part 
of a western state I was called to conduct a teachers' 
institute. One of the first things in which I found 
the teachers deficient was music. I am not a good 
singer, but I can sing much better than the person 
who cannot sing at all. I would not have a meet- 
ing of young people if I could not have some singing. 
I had taken with me several dozen song books and 
at once started the teachers singing. It. was a great 
pleasure to me to help them because they enjoyed 
singing and appreciated my help. 

One Sunday I was invited twenty miles into the 
country to visit, and was requested to bring my song 
books. We sang together some of the old songs. 
Notwithstanding that the parents were both gradu- 
ates of an eastern college, neither of them could sing. 
The mother told me that until the year before they 
never had had in their school a teacher who sang. 
This teacher taught the children a part of a song and 
then quit. To me it was one of the saddest things 
I had ever heard about a school. A place where chil- 
dren assembled, day after day, and month after 
month, and no singing! 

A school without music is not a fit place for 

216 



MUSIC, STORIES AND PLAY 217 

children, and a teacher who cannot conduct singing 
is not a fit person to have charge of a school. It is 
not absolutely necessary for a teacher to be able to 
sing. She can teach singing if she will. A teacher 
of my acquaintance was the most successful teacher 
of music in a school of fourteen teachers, and all 
the teachers but this one could sing. She directed 
the singing; she kept the time and she kept the 
singers together; she was successful although she 
herself never sang. 

Two* of the really commendable things which I 
had in my first school were singing and story telling. 

For the help of young teachers, and old teachers 
who are in earnest, I will tell how I managed to 
have singing. I could sing the old songs that I had 
learned in church, but that was all. Twice a month 
I went home, and there learned new pieces. Then I 
taught them to my school. We learned many good 
songs, and many that were not so very good, but they 
were songs that the pupils liked. 

Among the latter were, " The Spider and the 
Fly," "A Geography Song," "Little May," and 
" Robinson Crusoe." I can hear those children, little 
and big, singing that last song right now. 

"When I was a lad, I had cause to be sad, 
A very good friend I did lose; 

O, I warrant you, Dan, 

You have heard of this man, 
His name, it was Robinson Crusoe. 



218 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

Chorus: 

Oh, poor Robinson Crusoe, 
Poor old Robinson Crusoe, 

He went off to the sea 

And between you and me 
Old Neptune wrecked Robinson Crusoe." 

In order to get children to sing there must be a 
proper atmosphere. Children nor adults sing well 
when they are not in a good frame of mind. But one 
good thing about music is that unless conditions are 
too bad it will create its own atmosphere. The teacher 
who sends his school home in a bad humor has made 
a mistake, one that will work personal injury to the 
teacher. The teacher who can have his school sing 
one verse of some good song just before dismissal is 
making no mistake in having it do so. The 
teacher who " permits " singing and occupies his 
time grading papers or studying his lessons while his 
pupils sing has too crude a notion of the proprieties 
of a leader to entitle him to any consideration. To 
see the children of a school who in a former year 
had been blessed with an inspirational teacher who 
gave them high ideals, presided over (presided is 
not the right word) by a teacher who would " let 
them sing ' ' while he did some school work, makes 
an impression that time will not efface. 

Music is one of the most important subjects that 
can be used in preparation for leisure moments. 



MUSIC, STORIES AND PLAY 219 

It is the duty of parents and teachers to give chil- 
dren encouragement and help in learning to play 
some kind of musical instrument and in learning to 
use the voice. There are probably no public bene- 
factors so meanly used by the public as musicians ; 
and yet the whole world loves music. No celebra- 
tion is complete without it. When the band begins 
to play everyone from grandparents to babes in arms 
begins to take on new life. Those who have been 
gloomy and sad rejoice. 

In our churches music is featured whenever pos- 
sible. We are all proud of our pianist or organist, 
of our bass and soprano and tenor. No service is 
complete without them. We remember the Branden- 
burgs, Helekers, Rhodes, Spradlings and Browns 
who once were the leading male singers of our town. 
They sang for our christenings and for our funerals, 
and one dear old lady who had her teeth extracted 
invited them in to sing so that she would not mind 
the pain. They sang when the minister was leaving 
and when the governor visited us. When they did 
not sing there Was nothing going on. Right now I 
could tell you what they sang at the fall festival 
fifteen years ago, although I do not remember who 
the speaker of the day was, nor what he said, nor 
who introduced the speaker, nor who made the slide 
for life. 

The band, with its Clifts, Weises, Stowells, 



220 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

Warners and Bonifaces, put our town on the map. 
They were the best musicians in the state, and a town 
that does not have the " best " has not been discov- 
ered. They played for everything and were bor- 
rowed by all the neighboring towns. Everybody 
loved them and their music. They loved them al- 
most as much as they did our male singers. Not 
only did we love our musicians, but we were proud 
of them, and were always glad to have them sing or 
play when we were anxious to favorably impress 
visitors. 

They were our singers and our band, and the 
pianist was our pianist, and although we did not 
mention it, " it was all so inexpensive. It did not 
cost us anything." We could show them our beau- 
tiful streets, park, expensive churches and our thou- 
sand automobiles, municipal waterworks, white way, 
but these all possessed the ever-hidden sting, " It all 
costs, though." 

All the music to which I have referred never 
cost the taxpayers a cent. Indeed, not one lesson 
on piano, organ or other musical instrument was 
paid for by the public. These voices were all trained 
at private expense and on stolen time. The young 
lady doing high school work and taking piano lessons 
in order that she might the more efficiently serve 
her school and her church never had her work light- 
ened in the school on account of this sacrifice, nor 



MUSIC, STORIES AND PLAY 221 

was her accomplishment along this line accredited 
toward her graduation nor did it entitle her to be 
valedictorian of her class. In her commencement 
preparation she played for the many rehearsals. 
They could not have done without her. But the 
young man who could not forget and who never gave 
the school anything that could be classified as " ser- 
vice," who never did anything in church but sit and 
remember, and who was a useless member of society 
ever after, stood before our pianist, our orchestra, 
and our band and the taxpayers making his first and 
last contribution to a public that professed to believe 
in a socially efficient citizen. 

I anticipate no criticism of this expression of 
music and musicians. The public seems to believe 
all this, but school boards who object to paying for 
keeping in repair organs purchased for the schools 
by private subscription still live. Such boards are 
not all found among those who are f ormally declared 
uncultured and unrefined. 

The student of rural education or urban educa- 
tion is well aware that the attention given to cultural 
subjects in our schools is yet almost negligible. In 
the majority of schools music and art and physical 
culture are unworthy of the name. 

It requires more than fine buildings and several 
hundred children to make a school. To give a 
school of 2000 children one music teacher, one art 



222 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

teacher, one physical director, is to maintain these 
subjects in the curriculum only. 

A school that devotes five hours to the arithmetic 
of a young girl or boy and one hour to music does 
not need an educational expert to> give it proper classi- 
fication. The same is true of a school that teaches 
art in a similar way. 

The school that runs on the " six and six " plan 
and begins at 8 o'clock, runs without intermission till 
12.30, calls school again at 1.30, and with the excep- 
tion of " gym " one period a week gives the chil- 
dren no time for play, is violating the strongest 
beliefs of our strongest modern educators. 

The rural schools in whose interests this is 
written are, regardless of the generally accepted 
opinion, less restricted in their plays than any other 
schools. 

Indeed, with all the supervised play, with the 
city child, play is becoming a lost art, and with this 
loss comes an economic one that can hardly be 
estimated. 

The rural child gets to play, and only he who has 
forgotten or never knew thinks otherwise. It is in 
the rural school, where all interest is not centred in 
winning teams, that everybody plays. 

The games played now are the old ones and many 
new ones. In a reflective mood I recall some of the 



MUSIC, STORIES AND PLAY 223 

good times we had in Anthony-over, darebase, black- 
man, townball, old cat, kick the can and soak. 

Children like the dangerous; we did not have 
football, but we had two games that were just as 
satisfying in their results of broken noses, collar 
bones and cracked heads. These were shinny and 
crack-the-whip. 

It is with full knowledge of the million dollars 
invested in the gymnasiums of our state institutions 
and of the entire absence of investment for play 
apparatus in our rural schools that I make the asser- 
tion that no runner on an indoor track ever ran with 
greater enthusiasm or with faster palpitating heart 
than does the driver of a ten-horse team hitched to 
a good clothes line, as drivers and horses race, un- 
shod, down the public road. And the fun in snow- 
balling, which is not on the tabooed list, is worth 
remembering. 

Supervised play is to be commended, but the 
supervision must not be so close as to destroy free- 
dom and the initiative. Cities are working hard to 
provide play and opportunity for play, but it is im- 
possible to do so as successfully as can be done in 
the schools of moderate size (i.e., schools of ioo to 
500 pupils). Such schools can offer most advan- 
tageously a curriculum that functions with the busi- 
ness life and the social life of their people. In no 
other schools can such wholesome environment be 



224 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

had. In no city school are there such possibilities as 
are in store for the rural school that is sufficiently 
large to require a good teaching force — just large 
enough to properly handle a curriculum that does not 
abridge the right of any child of utmost freedom in 
the choice of an education that will function with his 
chosen life's vocation. 

We must educate for leisure moments. Those 
who receive no such education are unsafe members 
of society. In substantiation of this it will be but 
necessary for the reader to look about him, or pos- 
sibly to look within. How do we spend our time 
when we are not at work? This need not apply 
entirely to the youth, but to the adult as well. 

Your day's work is over. It has been unsatis- 
factory. You have done your very utmost to please 
and have failed to do so. You may have financial 
troubles. If a young man or young woman you may 
be downcast because of social disappointment. 
What is your avenue of escape? Are you prepared 
to meet this dark hour? Sometimes you may pour 
your troubles into another's soul and find comfort 
and sympathy there, but by such relief are you made 
stronger ? 

Have you trained yourself to entertain others 
with stories, with music ? Or are you a human para- 
site, always receiving but never giving? While you 
are at work you may not do yourself or society much 



MUSIC, STORIES AND PLAY 225 

wrong, but when you are not at work is the time that 
calls for strong special preparation. Then, if ever, 
is when you live. You may live in literature, in art, 
in music, in play, and if you do not, you are a dan- 
gerous member of society. The world professes to 
believe this, but the world does not believe it strongly 
enough to levy a tax. 

There are other avenues of escape from the ac- 
cumulations that beset us after our day of toil, and 
thousands there are who seek them. Some seek 
relief in narcotics and intoxicants, others do equally 
bad by succumbing to a morbid condition of mind, 
while those more sane seek the society of others who, 
like themselves, have made no preparation for leisure 
hours. In this last case much depends upon what 
may be the common interest and this depends wholly 
upon a past experience and preparation. 

The man burdened with business, who will quit 
work a few minutes early to take his daughter, whose 
life he would direct, and accompany her to gather 
violets ; who is willing and glad to assemble his chil- 
dren and his neighbor's children about him in an 
orchestra practice, is doing more to stamp out social 
evils than the man who preaches against social 
wrongs, but never directs the activities of the young. 

One must have lived a lifetime before he knows 
that the failures in life are not all among those who 
have not amassed fortunes. How many homes are 
15 



226 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

known to us that are not homes ? How many such 
places have reared sons and daughters that are men- 
aces to society ? Homes with parents who are capable 
of making money but are absolutely ignorant con- 
cerning the importance of training the finer emotions 
— of training for leisure ! 

Our thoughts make our character, and in these 
days of improved methods of farming and of manu- 
facture when many acts are mere automatisms, it be- 
comes most important that the mind be occupied with 
wholesome, invigorating thought. As the boy feeds 
the machine or rides the long furrows and rows, char- 
acter of the strongest or of the weakest sort is form- 
ing, which it is, depending upon his trend of thought, 
i.e., what he thinks when his thoughts are not em- 
ployed in directing his work. 

Many say that story telling is a gift. Story 
telling, like singing, can be done better by some than 
by others, but no teacher or parent who loves children 
will neglect this great work simply because he does 
not have the gift, and those who will are either in- 
different to one of the great necessities of the child 
or they are ignorant of it. 

When quite a small child I heard my father tell 
my mother something which at the time I felt in my 
heart was untrue. I had great regard for his word, 
but this time I doubted him from the very bottom 
of my heart. He had simply remarked to my mother 



MUSIC, STORIES AND PLAY 227 

that he was glad the day was the Sabbath. Many, 
many times since have I been glad for the same 
reason, but in my early childhood it was a day of 
torture and of unhappiness. In the morning we all 
went to church. First, Sunday school and then 
church. During the sermon we all sat in the large 
family pew and we all sat very quiet. The afternoon 
was never spent in visiting, hunting strawberries, 
fishing, or sleeping. The catechisms and the Bible 
for the older children, and the younger ones were 
taught by word of mouth. In the latter part of 
the day we gathered in a family circle and said our 
catechism and Bible verses. To me, a young child, 
this was an awful time, but after the tasks were 
finished we had an hour that to all was a happy one — 
story telling. It might be out of place here to tell 
of the hard struggle which my parents had to prop- 
erly provide for a large family ; of their many, many 
sacrifices, and of the great care and responsibility 
with which they were burdened in their great under- 
taking to rear so many children to become good citi- 
zens, but after I had finished I would have to say 
that the stories told me by them did more to bind 
them to me in love and affection than all else. I 
know all the stories of the Bible. Mother and father 
told them. They turned the day of torture into one 
of pleasure and gladness. Oh, we had other stories 
than Bible stories, although not on Sabbath eve. My 



228 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

mother had the " gift." She knew all the old fairy 
stories, and she knew about Will o' the Wisp, and 
she knew about Dido*, Cleopatra and Joan of Arc. 
Father knew about Alexander the Great, Oliver 
Cromwell, Grant and Stonewall Jackson, and we 
children knew about them too. He told us, and 
when we think of our happy childhood, nothing has 
a more prominent place in memory than the happy 
story hours. 

I have read a great deal of history, but my 
love for history had its start in stories that my father 
told. As a man I know of the importance of Bur- 
goyne's surrender, but I know it but little better 
than I knew it as a child, and sometimes my mind 
needs refreshing on the date, but not on the event. 
Indelibly is impressed the picture of Gates' army — ■ 
an aggregation of scarecrows, and of Burgoyne's 
troops, the flower of the British army. Between 
two* long lines of scarecrows I see the British soldiers 
in their brilliant uniforms, their guns shining so that 
they could be seen miles in the distance, lay down 
their arms. In these stories I got not only lessons in 
the history of our country, but lessons in patriotism. 
I learned of the many trials endured by the patriots. 
As a child I loved America and appreciated the 
sacrifices that had been made that there might be a 
government of, for and by the people. 

In my first school I was certain to bring in story 



MUSIC, STORIES AND PLAY 229 

telling. Elsewhere I have told you how poorly 1 
taught reading. I have seen history teachers who 
had " majored " in history in universities and col- 
leges, who could make more outlines and require 
more map work than any student could possibly 
master in the allotted time. They were called good 
history teachers, but the result of their work was that 
every pupil learned to dislike history. I care not how 
successful a teacher may be considered, if she fails 
to leave her pupils with a desire to " know more " 
she has not succeeded. This may be considered the 
acid test of good teaching. 

Although I taught reading very poorly, I com- 
pensated for this shortcoming by my story telling. 
By story telling I reduced tardiness to zero and kept 
the attendance almost perfect, and created in my 
pupils a desire to read for themselves. I gave them 
a great variety, and much was from the best authors. 
I found that Hawthorne's stories took well, also 
Washington Irving's. I have a very vivid recollec- 
tion of not feeling entirely comfortable in my recital 
of all parts of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. My 
greatest success was in Shakespeare and Longfellow. 
I began with Hamlet. First I wrote the names of 
the leading characters on the board, and as I told the 
story, simply of course, I pointed to the names. I 
then took up King Lear, and from it I was able to 
draw a splendid lesson. 



230 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

When I told the Comedy of Errors there was 
fun for everyone. In my library is a large volume 
of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. 
The book is well worn, but the " Presented by the 
Crossing School to Teacher, Christmas, 18— ," is 
still legible. 

In Hiawatha and Tales of the Wayside Inn we 
had such good times that I am sure many will never 
forget them, and in January of that year we did 
something that I am not certain was sensible — we 
dropped the fifth reader and took up Longfellow's 
poems, and we did it without a dissenting vote. 

When I tell you that my best friends are children 
and that the best friends that I have among men and 
women are those whose friendship I made while they 
were young, I will ask you to attribute it largely to 
the fact that I have won my way into their hearts 
by pretty stories. No man who loves children need 
be jealous of their love if he can tell a good story. 
It makes him one of them and they never forget. 

Only a few years ago I made an unofficial visit to 
a large rural school. The teacher was young, and 
on account of having company she was nervous, and 
because I used to get that way when I had company, 
she had my sympathy. 

She was a good teacher, but since she was afraid 
she was just then doing very poorly. 

To put her at ease I tried a formula which 



MUSIC, STORIES AND PLAY 231 

always works in such cases. I asked a few common- 
place questions loudly enough to be heard through- 
out the room. I then inquired about her primary 
grades. They were frightened at once. They are 
afraid of men and " men are not fit to be primary 
teachers." I asked to be allowed to give the primary 
grades an oral examination. The teacher gave her 
consent, reluctantly. My first question was, " Who 
was Golden Locks? " 

Second: " Who killed Cock Robin? " 
Third : " Who was Cinderella ? * 
Fourth : " Who was Uncle Remus ? " 
None of them knew about Uncle Remus, but they 
all wanted to know. I told the teacher that I 
would tell the children some of the Uncle Remus 
stories, but of course I would not want the older 
pupils to listen. They all heard for the first time 
stories of Brer Rabbit, Tar Baby, Mr. Dog, Mr. 
Fox and Mr. Wolf. 

Did the little people listen? Did the older ones 
listen ? Yes, they all listened. The teacher listened, 
and at the close of my twenty minutes' work every- 
one was happy, and there was no " company " and 
everyone was ready to work, and I was one of them. 
The question may arise in the reader's mind, " Does 
it pay to win the affection of children? " In answer 
to this I must say yes. The love of children is 
lasting. The dislikes of children are lasting also. 



232 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

In the public mind there is a prejudice against 
teachers. This prejudice is the outgrowth of child 
impressions ; those who have had teachers who saw 
life from the child's viewpoint will, when they reach 
adult life, seek rather than shun the companionship 
of teachers. In substantiation of these statements 
the reader is asked to recall his own experience, his 
recollections of a favorite uncle — his recollec- 
tions of the harsh and unsympathetic uncle. 
The former may never have risen high in the estima- 
tion of his fellowmen — the latter is a bad man, re- 
gardless of the public approbation. So much for 
early impressions — they are for life, and their 
obliteration is impossible. 

It is all important that teachers win the love and 
respect of children if they would teach them. This 
is not a new idea, but it is a true one and one so 
important that no teacher can afford to ignore it. 
To win child love and respect requires first of all, 
real sympathy for child life, and second, strict hon- 
esty. There is no possibility of one's escaping detec- 
tion who is lacking in either sympathy or honesty. 



CHAPTER XIX 

Training for Leisure 

The business of farming is of such a nature 
that it offers more time for self -improvement than do 
most other occupations. It is generally conceded 
that the rural school has not made as great progress 
as the city school, and this is due largely to the fact 
that less effort has been made to improve rural 
schools. Rural people have left the betterment of 
their schools to educators. In this way they have 
made a vital mistake; for it is a problem that must 
be worked out not by the educators alone, but also* 
by those most interested, or relief will not be found. 

In the city schools great changes have been 
effected, but how? Comprehensive and practical 
courses of study have been introduced, not suddenly, 
but only after decades of agitation. They have 
come through the very slow processes of evolution, 
from causes in which the educator can find but small 
comfort; since little change has come that is not 
traceable to external influence. Apparently none 
have been slower to see the demands of the world 
than the educator. 

Great and important changes will come to the 
rural school, but how great, how important, and how 
soon, depend almost entirely upon active and per- 

233 



234 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

sistent agitation of rural people. The rural com- 
munities are possessed of a provident citizenship and 
are to-day facing the greatest of the world's oppor- 
tunities. They are feeding the world, but they are 
not teaching the world or leading the world. They 
have, however, potentialities awaiting liberation 
which will give to the world greater educators and 
greater leaders. These powers are not long to re- 
main inactive, and already expressions of discontent 
and unrest are heard from every quarter. 

The most encouraging sign of the times is that 
the need of better schools is being generally recog- 
nized by the rural people themselves, as everywhere, 
on every hand, their cry is going up, " Our schools 
are inadequate. They turn out students who are 
unable to cope with the world's problems." 

Never before has there been greater demand for 
schools that prepare the boys and girls for the life 
which they are to lead, and, generally speaking, prep- 
aration means the ability to make a living. 

We are witnessing as never before the drift of 
rural people to> the cities ; indeed, this movement has 
become so great as to occasion national alarm, and 
everywhere the question is being asked, " How can 
the tide be turned? " " How can the boy and girl 
who are discontented with rural life be made con- 
tented and glad of an opportunity to> remain on the 
farm instead of going to the city ? " 



TRAINING FOR LEISURE 235 

Boys and girls who are country bred and who are 
inclined toward the city will answer, if you ask why 
they are leaving the farm, that they want more 
lucrative employment, that they want shorter hours, 
that they want better social opportunities. If the 
mothers of these boys would be asked why they en- 
courage this movement toward the city they will 
reply, " We want all these things for our children. 
We want better educational advantages, we want for 
ourselves better homes, we want to be able to live at 
least as well as the poor of the town." 

Generally speaking the interests of the small 
town are distinctively agricultural. Towns of 2500 
and less are not cities in a proper sense of the 
term, nor can their schools be city schools, and to 
devote them solely to the interests of city people is 
as unjust as it is absurd. The schools of the small 
towns are the logical centres for the first rural graded 
schools. These places can with properly revised 
courses of study administer first aid, and when they 
have been made to function with the activities of 
the lives of the people whom they are to serve, one 
great public service will have been rendered. People, 
whether they live in the rural town or in the open 
country, are entitled to such schools. 

The educational demands of the present should 
be for the betterment of educational advantages for 
rural people. Cities have safeguarded their educa- 



236 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

tional interests, and will continue to do so, and unless 
there' be a general awakening of rural people the 
superiority of city schools over rural schools will 
become more marked. 

The demands of the times are for a higher educa- 
tion. If our fathers gave us but a high school edu- 
cation they did no more for us than did their fathers 
for them when they gave them but a common school 
education, and to do as well by our children as 
our parents did by us we should give them a college 
education. 

Many a father is heard to say, " I had but a 
common school education and what was good enough 
for me is good enough for my son." This is hon- 
estly expressed, but it is untrue. The competition 
of to-day calls for better preparation. Furthermore, 
we have no more cheap lands in the United States 
making it possible for one to* get an easy start. 
Those of the present who' justify present conditions 
by the statement, " It's always been so; the schools 
of now were good enough for our parents, were good 
enough for us and are good enough for our chil- 
dren," do not realize the great social and economic 
changes that have come to the last two generations. 
By those who are sufficiently interested to study con- 
ditions it is recognized as meaning more, right now, 
to fill a place in the business world than at any other 
time in the history of our nation. Competition is 



TRAINING FOR LEISURE 237 

much sharper in this country with its one hundred 
millions of people than when there were but fifty 
millions. 

Nineteen thirty-five is not far in the future, but if 
the normal rate of increase continues, a child born 
to-day will be but graduating from high school when 
our population will have reached the enormous num- 
ber of one hundred and eighty millions and by the 
time he is forty-five years of age he will be one of a 
population of three hundred and sixty millions. 

In the matter of military preparedness there may 
be good grounds for and against the proposition, but 
in the matter of preparedness for social efficiency 
there can be but one opinion. This preparedness for 
rural people cannot come through antiquated 
methods. 

A few years ago Hell Gate was blown up, admit- 
ting many ships of the largest draught. How was 
this done? Did they apply methods that were in 
use a century ago? No; methods used so long ago 
would not have been effective. With modern appli- 
ances a little girl was instrumental in blowing to 
atoms thousands of tons of rock and rendering safe 
to shipping one of the danger places of the world. 

Present conditions are too perilous to contem- 
plate unless such contemplation be made with a view 
of enabling present and future generations to rise to 
their responsibility. 



238 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

This responsibility demands not that we shall 
cease to educate for the development of intellect and 
character, for the inculcation of a proper apprecia- 
tion of the flowers growing by life's wayside, of the 
birds in our groves, of poets living and dead, of a 
virtue that leads to honor and happiness, of a deep 
respect and love for the drawers of water and the 
hewers of wood ; " but that with it all we shall be 
aware that this development and appreciation are 
dependent upon a physical environment which is not 
independent of that homeliest of decrees, ' Man shall 
live by the sweat of his face.' " 

Present conditions make it necessary that our 
children get an education and that they get it early. 

In getting this education it is necessary, or it is 
best, that it be gotten at home where parents may 
exercise their guiding influence through the impres- 
sionable years. If all the people or even a majority 
of the people are to give their children a high school 
education, this education must for financial reasons 
be had at home. To send a boy to high school where 
he must remain away from home and pay his board 
will mean the incurring of an expense of four or 
five hundred dollars per year. If the school can be 
had at home there will be a saving of a larger part of 
this amount of money and besides the boy can give 
assistance by doing home work and will retain his 
interest in the home, which is most desirable. Again, 



TRAINING FOR LEISURE 239 

if we have the home high school, it will mean a 
local control of the school. A local control will mean 
not only the number and kinds of teachers which we 
may desire, but it will include the kind of a course 
of study which shall be pursued. 

It will be possible under such control to have a 
curriculum that will meet local needs and will edu- 
cate the boys and girls for what is likely to be their 
life work. If a community maintains a school that 
stands for little in which the community has a vital 
interest, it is maintaining a school that will not be 
very popular and will be of doubtful value. 

The main business of a rural community is farm- 
ing. The principal interest is agricultural, and any- 
thing which has for its main purpose that which will 
draw the young man and the young woman away 
from the interest of that community is bad. 

The rural schools should maintain high stand- 
ards. The rural high schools should maintain ac- 
credited relations with the highest educational insti- 
tutions of the state, and it is possible to have these 
accredited relations and emphasize that side of edu- 
cation which will mean most to the community which 
a particular school would serve. It is neither neces- 
sary nor desirable that a high school should confine 
its efforts to preparing for college five out of every 
hundred and neglect to educate in terms of their busi- 
ness ninety-five out of every hundred. Much thought 



240 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

is being given by the sociologist as to how physical 
and occupational environment affect the life of rural 
people, of farmers' chances for intellectual improve- 
ment, on the decadence of rural churches, etc. It is 
not enough to know that certain conditions exist, it 
is not enough to know how these conditions are to 
be eliminated, enough will not be until conditions 
have been alleviated. These conditions must be 
remedied through the rural schools. The people are 
demanding relief; they have asked for bread and 
been given a stone. The great cry of " Why away 
from the farm? " is a direct result of our educational 
system. The education offered has been a means to 
an end, and that end in far too> many instances has 
been the avoidance of work. 

Until recent years we have thought that manual 
labor was degrading. We have taught that educa- 
tion is for social efficiency, but not that social effi- 
ciency is a capability for making a living. To* be 
educated has meant to* be cultured, and culture and 
work have been most strongly differentiated. But 
a few years ago a professional man with more than a 
high school education addressed a class of young 
men and women who were being graduated from a 
rural high school. He stressed the great importance 
of education and after enumerating the many bene- 
fits that would go with such an education he reached 
the climax by saying : " Young ladies and gentlemen, 



TRAINING FOR LEISURE 241 

had I been content to go without more than a high 
school education I might to-day be following a 
plow." Such was his notion of education. He be- 
lieved, and was free to say to a people living in a 
rural community, that following the plow was de- 
grading. Schools that foster such sentiments are 
not a benefit but a curse to a community that they 
would serve. 

One of the troubles that we are having with our 
schools to-day is that boys and girls drop out of 
school too early. Sixty-five out of every hundred 
in the schools of Kansas quit school before they 
are fourteen years old. We say that they take no 
interest in school work, that they are not interested 
in education. Some of our best boys and girls seem 
to lack interest in school work. They are bright and 
capable and industrious and would eagerly enter into 
the activity of the school if it were more practical 
and less negative in its processes, more constructive 
and less destructive in its aims. 

We boast of hundreds of high schools to-day as 
compared with scores fifty years ago, and yet these 
high schools, though supported by a tax upon the 
public, are built upon old line policies, ministering to 
the needs of the few and neglecting the necessities of 
the many. 

So notorious is this condition that one might 
cite examples of rural high schools established for a 
16 



242 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

specific line of instruction adopting the old line 
policies which they should especially avoid, and 
neglecting to incorporate those subjects in which a 
rural people are most in need, ignoring their immedi- 
ate and personal interests. 

A rural high school offering two years of Ger- 
man and three years of Latin and no vocational work 
is a deservedly unpopular institution. 

In many cases pupils completing the work of the 
eighth grade drop out of school because there is no 
high school near their homes, but one of the main 
causes for their leaving school so early, or earlier, is 
the lack of harmony between the actual needs and 
natural tendencies and the subjects offered them at 
this period. Being denied the opportunity for the 
development of the initiative, the opportunity for an 
activity that results in originality, the opportunity 
for doing, they drop out of school unprepared for 
life's demands. 

The revolt of the adolescent's mental attitude 
toward the ordinary school curriculum is often com- 
plete, and according to the views of many prominent 
educators is most natural. In this period they wish 
to express themselves through motor activity, but 
ordinarily they are reduced to a state of mental 
passivity. At the time when the school should de- 
velop the higher activities, adequate nutrition in the 



TRAINING FOR LEISURE 243 

form of appropriate stimuli cannot be had from in- 
appropriate environments and suppression. 

In the adolescent period the child longs to do 
things, to produce and to acquire, and his training up 
to this time should be such as to prepare him for 
these activities. Not to offer those things that make 
him a factor in the business world is to lose the bene- 
fits of previous training and insure a future eco- 
nomic loss to the state. 

The inability to make a living, to successfully 
compete with their fellowmen is the cause of 88 per 
cent, of the crime for which young men are sent to 
the state reformatory. In the reformatory they are 
taught some trade and statistics show that 75 per 
cent, of the inmates make good when given their 
freedom. Quoting from Davenport's Education for 
Efficiency, "It is dangerous to attempt to educate 
a live boy with no reference to the vocational." 

Sixty-five per cent, of our people leave school 
before the age of fourteen. Surveys show that in 
every community there are many young people out 
of school with no more than a common school educa- 
tion and frequently with less. The choice of occu- 
pation is being left to chance. Many are at this 
moment simply drifting, preparing for nothing and 
looking to nothing definite. They are simply hoping 
and trusting and we can truly say, judging from the 
past, that many of them are trusting in forlorn hopes. 



244 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

It is not conceivable how this condition can exist 
without convincing the adult population of grave 
responsibilities. The public schools have a responsi- 
bility which they must either assume or else share 
with penal and charitable institutions, for whose 
growth the derelictions of the public schools is the 
largest contributing factor. 

It has been said that it is impossible for one who 
has no leisure time to be cultured. It is quite certain 
that leisure does not necessarily secure culture, but 
leisure does affect opportunities for culture, and 
unquestionably the skilful mechanic or workman 
will have more time for leisure and greater oppor- 
tunity for culture. Vocational education may be 
possessed of culture, just as may education in poetry 
and history, and like these subjects it may be with- 
out culture. 

There may be those who* translate Virgil as 
readily as they read their mother tongue, who quote 
from Browning, Shakespeare, Chaucer— who* know 
so much history that they grieve because more has 
not been written, and who* in spite of all these are 
the embodiments of slovenliness. They may do all 
these things but never write a word that they do not 
smear, nor make lines that are not crooked ; they may 
do all these things, but never wear colors that harmo- 
nize ; or see sunsets that are beautiful, or women that 
are perfect, or men who are not " diaboli incarnati." 



TRAINING FOR LEISURE 245 

There may be men who travel as master work- 
men who violate every law of building, whose finish- 
ing touches spoil the splendid work of the workmen 
who preceded them. A beautifully designed build- 
ing may never reach completion, because of the lack 
of culture of its workmen — each succeeding work- 
man doing something to mar the other's work — 
carpenters with no respect for the masons, and masons 
none for the plasterer, and plasterer none for any 
man, woman, child, brickwork, stucco, stone or win- 
dow that comes within reach of his trowel ; and the 
painter for crudity, sloppiness and smear may be 
greatest among ten thousand. Surely one must be 
born with certain aptitudes. Thousands are wise and 
cultured by education, and some are slovens and 
boobs in spite of their education. 

It required Booker T. Washington to discover 
that it is dangerous to attempt to educate a negro 
with no reference to the vocational. " It is danger- 
ous to attempt to educate any active boy without 
reference to the vocational," and detrimental to 
man's spiritual expectancy to neglect to educate for 
leisure hours. Those who have an earning capacity 
are efficient, economically considered, but if they do 
their work in a shiftless way, whether it be cooking 
or sewing, plowing or building, teaching or preach- 
ing — if they do their work without love for it, or 
ambition to excel, and only when scourged by neces- 



246 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

sity, their vocation is pulling them down, is degrad- 
ing them, reducing them to the level of their kind, 
the uneducated, unskilled, uncultured. 

Culture and refinement are innate just as are 
the wild flowers of the prairies. These will blossom 
and give forth fragrance when warmed by the sun 
and wet by the rains and the dews. An education 
which opens the mind to the beauties of the universe 
and creates within the heart a love and a sympathy 
for every living creature, and especially for the man 
and the woman who are the producers of wealth, 
who earn their living by economic methods, is the 
sun, the rain and the dew by which culture and 
refinement can be made an integral part of a social 
efficiency. A life of money and money alone is un- 
economic, is destructive to the best that is in man. 
A practical education — any education that pays- 
must not be one that can be measured in its entirety 
by yards, acres, pounds, bushels and dollars. 

Surveys of industrial conditions, social and 
otherwise, teach that we must educate for social 
efficiency. This means much more than plowing for 
corn to feed hogs, to feed children, to enable them 
to plow more corn. It means more than working in 
shops, offices and stores eight hours a day. It means 
all these, but it means more — it means that the indi- 
viduals of the many industrial classes will be socially 
efficient when they have a trade, a profession or a 



TRAINING FOR LEISURE 247 

business at which they can provide for their own and 
their families' welfare, and be happy and safe during 
their leisure hours. If there is an educational aim 
other than the bread and butter aim it is education 
for leisure moments, and the boy on the farm needs 
this education as much as the boy in the factory, 
office or store. As man comes more and more to 
know himself and to know his fellows, the more 
thoroughly is he convinced that if he has not pre- 
pared for leisure moments he is likely to be unhappy 
and unsafe. 

The rural church will continue to decay, the 
rural school continue to be inefficient and rural com- 
munity centres and social uplift questions remain 
questions till we have rural schools for rural people, 
which will mean fewer schools with many more 
courses. The schools must contribute to the making 
of social efficiency. 

One of the great problems confronting the 
American people at the present time is that of pro- 
viding good teachers for all the schools. In its 
declaration of principles the National Education 
Association says : 

" The National Education Association notes with 
approval that the qualifications demanded of teachers 
in the public schools are increasing annually, and par- 
ticularly in many localities special preparations are 
demanded for teachers. The idea that anyone with 



248 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

a fair education can teach school is gradually giving 
way to the correct notion that teachers make special 
preparation for the vocation of teaching.'' 

We cannot have better schools unless we have 
better teachers. Fine schoolhouses, good libraries, 
complicated apparatus are admirable, but unless be- 
hind this educational machinery are real teachers 
there will result no better schools than the present 
average country school. The more we load our- 
selves down with appliances, the more plainly it 
appears that the prime requisite is the trained 
teacher. Upon his or her personal fitness rests the 
future of the country. 

Our schools are not properly supplied with com- 
petent teachers, and especially is this true of the rural 
school. The rural community needs better school 
buildings and it needs consolidation of its schools 
and courses of study functioning with its life, but 
its direct need is better teachers. 

It is asserted upon tolerably good authority that 
the United States is able to compete with Germany, 
France, England, Denmark, Switzerland, Belgium, 
Holland, Sweden and Japan in some particulars 
only because of her greater natural resources, which 
are rapidly being exhausted. Unless the United 
States improves her schools, she is doomed to take 
second rank ere long. All those countries, earlier 



TRAINING FOR LEISURE 249 

than we, recognized that universal education of the 
right kind is the only road to success. 

The countries named above have solved the 
problem of providing trained teachers, for their 
schools. France, for example, supports with public 
funds over two hundred training schools for teach- 
ers, selects with care young men and women to fill 
them as students, pays the board, cost of room, 
books and instruction of these students while taking 
the course, provides them with schools at good sal- 
aries as long as they teach, and when they retire 
from active service gives them a pension sufficient 
for their support. Every teacher in the realm is a 
trained teacher. Teaching is in the fullest sense 
a profession. 

Agriculture is now a recognized part of many 
state common school courses. Its importance is 
conceded to the same extent as arithmetic or any 
of the other common branches. A large number of 
the teachers serve apprenticeships in our rural 
schools. The necessity of their having agriculture is 
at once apparent. 

Those who do not have to serve this apprentice- 
ship are called to the villages and smaller town 
schools where the demands are not widely different 
from those made by the rural schools. In fact, the 
inefficiency of the rural schools is driving the rural 
pupil into the town schools, and until these rural 



250 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

schools are brought to a higher degree of efficiency 
parents will continue to send their children to the 
town schools, even at a considerable cost for trans- 
portation. And here lies one of the dangers — this 
large influx from the country makes it necessary 
to provide courses of instruction along lines which 
shall be of most service to the country child if he 
is not to be educated away from the country life effi- 
ciency. Even though few children from the country 
receive instruction in the city schools, a reason still 
exists for instruction that will be of much service to 
the city child. 

No one can successfully teach geography, liter- 
ature or nature study who is not familiar with the 
principles of agriculture. No one can understand 
or appreciate the child life interests who under- 
stands nothing of child life, and for these reasons 
teachers should be prepared to teach agriculture in 
city schools as well as in rural schools. 

Experience in teaching in many departments of 
school work leads to the conviction that no subject 
requires more sound knowledge of the principles 
of pedagogy than does the subject of agriculture. 
Results are not immediate. In the child, objective 
interest predominates. The child is ever interested 
in results, and those results must be immediate. 
The garden planted today is dug up by the impatient 
child tomorrow, and expectancy is ever on tip- 



TRAINING FOR LEISURE 251 

toe. Hence the child's interest must be maintained 
until results may be accomplished naturally. A con- 
tinuity of subject matter must be worked out, and 
new devices are always necessary to maintain inter- 
est, and none but the thoroughly trained in pedagogy 
can meet these requirements. 

Since the rural teacher must teach children of the 
lower grades as well as those of the upper grades, 
it is necessary that she be informed on nature study. 
Preparation for nature study will require a 
rather wider education than knowing a few flowers 
and trees and the names of animals used for pets. 
Nature study admirers have more than a three-fold 
proposition unless they bow to the utilitarian as well 
as the aesthetic. Their ideals must lead further than 
an acquaintance with immediate environment. It is 
well, and most commendable, that the child be led 
to see the beauties of nature, the ever-varying tints 
of the heavens, the beauties of the wild flowers, 
and that it hears with appreciation songs of the 
murmuring brooks and of the carolling birds, and to 
observe how Arachna spins and spins and is doomed 
to keep on spinning; but is this work so built into 
the course that it can and will be of service later in 
the child's school work? If so, nature study will 
live and prosper in the lower grades of the rural 
schools and should be correlated with every study 



252 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

possible, forming a valuable preparation for the 
study of agriculture in the upper grades. 

Is it too much to say that nature study that pre- 
pares not children for real life by enabling them to 
gain an understanding and mastery of the physical 
conditions of life and the varied utilities of life is 
of little worth? Is it asking too much to ask that 
nature study work develop self-reliance, respect for 
labor and teach that only by one's self action can one 
hope to be of service ? It is too much to ask that a 
work so beautiful in itself, so filled with good and so 
essential to child development should be so con- 
structed as to be a beautiful and solid foundation 
from which may rise an edifice not only of structural 
beauty, but an edifice that will contribute to the 
future welfare of American citizenship ? 

Nature study offers a rich practical field, and 
through nature, sympathy and observation children 
will have a foundation for science and scientific agri- 
culture. Accurate knowledge of nature, however 
simple it may be, is essential. 

Nature study is based on truth, not imagination, 
not sentimentality. Nature study develops mind, 
soul and body. It lays the foundation for the great- 
est of all industries, an industry absolutely essential 
to national prosperity, an industry in which every 
child as producer or consumer is an economic factor. 

Theorizing on what should be will amount to but 



TRAINING FOR LEISURE 253 

little unless it causes an awakening of those most con- 
cerned. Rural people must work out their own 
problems. 

The rural people have made great progress and 
have made it under adverse conditions. These con- 
ditions are peculiar to rural life, and many of the 
attendant hardships are the unavoidable results of 
these conditions. 

It is absolutely necessary that an agricultural 
district be less densely populated than are manufac- 
turing and commercial districts. The fact that rural 
districts are sparsely inhabited throws responsibility 
upon few instead of many. Tax is paid by the few, 
and the territory served is so great that city stand- 
ards for public improvements are prohibitive for 
rural improvements. 

It is beyond reason to expect that rural roads 
shall equal city streets, or that the country roadsides 
shall be as well kept where one man is responsible 
for one hundred and sixty rods, as is the parking 
along a city street where one man usually has the 
care of less than sixty feet. It is unnecessary and 
undesirable that city standards should prevail in 
rural places, and this applies to rural schools, rural 
churches and rural society as well as to rural roads. 

The parent has a responsibility for his child's 
future welfare, and nowhere so much as in rural 



254 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

places does this responsibility extend to the neigh- 
bor's child as well. 

The sparsely settled condition of rural commu- 
nities makes those living in those communities more 
dependent socially than are those living in towns 
and cities. Here it is less possible to choose one's 
associates, and here as nowhere else can one suffer 
neglect without all being affected. It is therefore 
imperative that there be a closer organization and a 
more united effort among rural people than there 
have been in the past. Owing to adverse conditions 
it will require a greater effort, a greater expenditure 
of energy, time and money tO' make this organization 
and effort effective than would be required for a 
similar effectiveness under urban conditions. The 
foregoing will illustrate fundamental difficulties in 
nearly all rural problems and suggest that these 
problems be attacked with a thoughtfulness, earnest- 
ness and determination that will inevitably bring 
solutions of all great world problems. 

The activity herein suggested must be purpose- 
ful. First of all there must be unmistakable recog- 
nition of certain needs, clear and definite objects to 
be accomplished. 

Farming, after all, is a means to an end. The 
farmer with children has for his purpose the rear- 
ing of these children to become intelligent, useful, 
happy, contented citizens ; and neither happiness nor 



TRAINING FOR LEISURE 255 

contentment comes to those who feel that their lots 
are harder than others have to bear, or their oppor- 
tunities less favorable. 

Better means of transportation, automobiles and 
good roads are bringing happiness and contentment 
to many rural homes. Social differences and social 
distinctions are rapidly disappearing on account of 
these. Ministers are beginning to recognize that 
they have no longer two classes of people in their 
congregations. Everyone recognizes the church as 
a powerful socializing influence, but in this it will 
not stand comparison with the school. The school 
is a territorial institution, and our only really demo- 
cratic institution, but the school does not measure up 
to the church as a social institution except in the 
most progressive and educated communities. Any 
community can be educated and progressive, pro- 
vided it wants to be, a simple case of heart and 
treasure being in the same place. For the accom- 
plishment of these results there must be a passion for 
real productive achievement along definite lines. 

It is no less unkind than untrue to say that rural 
people do not realize their responsibility to their 
children ; or that they are less sacrificing than are the 
urban parents. Rural people have made greater 
sacrifices for their children than have people in other 
industrial lines, and these sacrifices have been re- 
warded with incommensurate returns. 



CHAPTER XX 

Suggested Improvements 

The rural schools must be reorganized; they 
must have consolidation so that they can have a 
larger school unit, so they may employ more teachers 
and better teachers, so they may foe able to keep their 
teachers for a longer time, and so they may have 
more comprehensive courses of study, offering those 
things which do function with the business of the 
community. The open country and the school of 
the open country as well as the church are looking 
to the rural town. And by the rural town is meant a 
town of 2500 or smaller population. Our rural 
towns must furnish the basis or the nucleus for the 
first consolidated schools. These towns already 
have schools of such proportion as to afford splendid 
opportunity for their own students and for those 
of the open country. It has been argued by some that 
the rural school should not be connected with the 
rural town school because the interests of these two 
peoples are so widely different, but the interests of 
these two peoples are not widely different and the 
small town problem is not going to be benefited by 
the establishment of consolidated schools. In fact, 
the establishment of consolidated schools in the open 
country is likely to increase the number of small 

256 



SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS 257 

towns. Following the consolidation of our schools 
will come in some places the building of a rural 
church, the building of a parsonage and a house for 
the teacher, which will be followed by some other 
small buildings such as a blacksmith shop, and a 
store, and postoffice — another small town. Again, 
as the means of transportation improve, society re- 
solves itself into larger units. The schools adjacent 
to towns will be the first to consolidate. These 
larger schools may be properly classified as consoli- 
dated in that they will be graded and conveniently 
located and in that pupils from outside districts 
will be transported at public expense. True, con- 
solidation will be slower in establishing itself in 
distinctively rural places, but the time is not very 
far distant when even these places will favor the 
larger schools. In these larger schools, as has been 
stated, the curriculum must be made to function with 
the life of the community and the school term must 
be adjusted and modified to meet the requirements 
of the community. 

The greatest obstacles in the way of better 
schools are the systems of management and taxation. 
The schools of the several states are being operated 
under three distinct systems — the district, the town- 
ship and the county. In addition there are several 
mixed systems in which the management is divided 
17 



258 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

between the district and the township, the district 
and county, or the township and county. 

The district unit, such as in Kansas, is the most 
common unit of organization for the country as a 
whole. It is the complete basis for rural elementary 
school management in seventeen states and in four 
others in part. It is also the larger factor in seven 
others that have semi-county systems, in which the 
balance of power rests with the districts rather than 
with the counties. 

In Massachusetts when each settlement was sep- 
arate and distinct from all others there originated 
the first public schools, which of necessity were as 
the settlements, separate and distinct from all others. 
The territory between the districts so established was 
originally unorganized, but as it became settled it 
was included in school districts, and the district 
system remained long after conditions responsible 
for it had passed away. 

The district system met conditions that probably 
could not have been met so successfully by any other 
known system, but the conditions making it the only 
feasible one exist now but in few places in the United 
States, and certainly in but few places in Kansas. 

The statement that " any community can be edu- 
cated and progressive, provided it wants to be," can- 
not stand without certain qualifications. The com- 
munity must have a desire for these things suffi- 



SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS 259 

ciently strong to induce it to secure legislation that 
will abolish the pernicious system that makes it 
possible for very good schools and very poor schools 
to exist in adjacent districts. Under the district 
system the character of the school often depends 
upon a board wholly ignorant of what a school 
should be, and even when the board is composed of 
men of high ideals it is powerless because of in- 
sufficient funds, properly to maintain a good school. 
These are conditions that always have and always 
will exist under the district plan. 

The judgment of most observers is that the dis- 
trict plan is neither economical nor efficient, and the 
tendency in all the states is toward a larger unit. 

It is generally recognized that the public good is 
best conserved when the body affected acts as a 
whole. This is most aptly illustrated by state-wide 
prohibition and local option. There are within the 
state, communities that would license the saloon but 
for the prohibition placed on it by the state, and well 
meaning temperance people would be powerless to 
prevent it. There are many school districts that 
have the fewest number of months of school possible 
and hire the cheapest teachers obtainable, regardless 
of the wishes of an intelligent, ambitious minority. 

Education, like temperance, is more than a local 
interest. The locality in which one is raised is not 
certain to be his permanent abode, and therefore his 



260 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

education must be for the preparation that will en- 
able him to meet other than local conditions. 

The district system has permitted the forming 
of too many small schools and these schools do not 
yield readily to consolidation because of the fear of 
many individuals that in the larger unit they will lose 
prestige. Because of this jealousy and the desire to 
retain leadership, inferior schools are maintained 
at great educational loss to the child and at an un- 
economic expenditure of money. 

The district system deprives the rural boy and 
girl of the opportunity for higher education unless 
this education is gotten away from home. The 
citizens of the state have a right to expect that the 
school funds be expended in the most economical 
way. With the district system there can be some 
good schools, but under it there can never be a good 
system of schools. Consolidation of the small dis- 
tricts would equalize school advantages, and, as be- 
fore stated, will make possible a more economical 
administration of the schools. 

There is a general agreement among school 
authorities that there should be a larger school unit 
of school administration. Some favor the township 
as a unit, others the county. 

Whether consolidation shall take the form of 
several large schools in each county or shall be the 
township system or a county system is a question 



SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS 261 

for intelligent and serious consideration. All of 
these systems are meeting with success and are 
being quite generally approved even by those who 
most strongly opposed them. In answer to the fol- 
lowing questions, 39 out of 40 clerks of consoli- 
dated schools gave favorable answers. The answers 
given here are typical : 

1. Do you transport pupils? Yes. 

2. What is your longest drive ? 4 miles. 

3. What do you pay the driver? $25 to $35. 

4. How early do wagons start? 7.30 to 7.45. 

5. How far do pupils walk to meet the wagons ? 
Y? to 24 mile. 

6. Do you have trouble with or objection to 
transportation? No. 

7. What is the longest walk that any pupil has ? 
i}4 to 2 miles. 

8. Has consolidation increased your taxes? 
Yes. 

9. How much? 10 per cent, to 25 per cent. 

10. Has consolidation been successful? Yes. 

1 1 . Would you go back to the old plan ? Xo. 

12. How has it helped your school? Increased 
the enrollment, reduced the tardiness and irregular 
attendance and has given us high school advantages. 
We have more work and a better course of study. 

The answers to the last two questions, since they 



262 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

came from a clerk who opposed consolidation, are 
full of interest. 

The proposition to consolidate carries with it 
usually the proposition to furnish free transporta- 
tion to those who live beyond a reasonable walking 
distance from the proposed school. Consolidation 
can no longer be considered in its experimental stage, 
as already legislation has opened the way in about 
half the states for the transportation of pupils at 
public expense. 

Since consolidation is one of the most important 
contemplated changes affecting public schools, it is 
advisable that all those interested in rural schools 
consider it in the most open-minded way. 

(i) That we have always had the little one- 
room school is not in itself a justification for its 
continuance. 

(2) The fact that it is a radical change is not 
conclusive proof that it is an undesirable change. 

(3) Because it is within walking distance from 
every part of a certain farming district to a poor 
one-room school the abandonment of this school 
for a larger and more efficient school that is within 
a reasonable riding distance should not result in 
decreased real estate values. Improved means of 
travel and better roads are bringing the larger towns 
nearer to the farms, and they are bringing the larger 
schools nearer to the rural communities. Fewer 



SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS 263 

towns, better towns — fewer schools, better schools. 

(4) The fact that a larger and better school 
costs more than a small poor school is not enough to 
warrant the decision that the former is the less 
desirable. 

(5) While it is alleged that children may be 
compelled to travel too far in cold and stormy 
weather, and obliged to walk to meet the team in 
wet weather, and ride the remainder of the distance 
in wet clothing, and that children thus conveyed are 
brought in too close contact with vicious children, 
and that the driver is frequently an improper per- 
son, it must be remembered that these are objec- 
tions to be done away with by school officers whose 
powers can be sufficient to overcome and prevent 
most of these causes of complaint. 

In making a business venture it is fully as proper 
to estimate the gains and the probability of gains 
as it is to estimate the losses and the probability 
of losses. 

(a) If rural schools are poorly graded, and it is 
almost impossible properly to classify the pupils, and 
these defects can be remedied through consolida- 
tion, two very good reasons may be offered for con- 
solidation: Better grading and classification will 
permit both teacher and pupils to work more effec- 
tively; more time can be given to recitation and 
greater opportunity for much needed correlation. 



264 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

(b) If such cultural subjects as nature study, 
drawing and music, and vocational subjects such, as 
manual training, mechanical drawing, agriculture, 
domestic science and domestic art, are, while very 
valuable subjects, an impossibility in the one-room 
rural school, but entirely possible in a consolidated 
school, two additional reasons may be given for 
consolidation. 

(c) If nine months is a better length of school 
term than seven months, the consolidated school is 
better, because it is the more likely to give the nine 
months' term. 

(d) If it is true, as charged, that rural teachers 
are young, immature, untrained and inefficient, and 
that the ablest of these find better positions in the 
town schools ; and if it is true, as teachers themselves 
testify, that pupils in the small rural schools do not 
feel the inspiration of the highly competitive life, 
then the consolidated school is better because it 
insures better teachers, and more contented teachers, 
and the retention of teachers, and the consolidated 
school offers the stimuli of large classes, creating 
enthusiasm and intellectual rivalry and a confidence 
which comes only from contact with numbers. 

(e) If, as is claimed by those who have tried 
consolidation, the consolidated school results in more 
regular attendance, affords a broader companionship 
and culture and quickens the public interest, is there 



SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS M5 

not abundant evidence that the consolidated schools 
can fill a real need in country life? 

Will a larger school unit provide permanent edu- 
cational and intellectual centres? If so, will such 
centres determine the locations of permanent social 
and economic centres ? As stated in a former para- 
graph, relief for rural schools will come only through 
the activity of rural people. It is practically safe 
to predict that the school is to become a school for 
the people. Up till recent years the public has been 
slow to act in matters pertaining to education, but 
now the nation has awakened, and like it as we may, 
it is demanding an education that will function with 
the life that is to be lived in a practical world. It is 
demanding an education that has utility, an educa- 
tion that will work. 

The idea that mental development and culture 
must be divorced from the material world, avoiding 
everything possessed of utility, everything that is 
practical, everything that might function with the 
world's business, has been the educational creed of 
many an educator ; and the only justification, apology 
or alibi that can be pleaded is that he has led a 
life wholly in accord with his adherence to doctrines 
of the consecrated past, believing with a child's faith 
that it is unpardonable sacrilege to change that 
" which they of old time have set." Human nature 
is probably not changing very much and while no 



266 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

one is advocating an education with a dollar for a 
central core, the world is demanding that there be an 
economy of time, that the school shall mean more in 
the future than in the past, that the school shall pre- 
pare the youth for the life that he is to lead, and life 
is to mean making a living as well as living. 

In the township system the schools are under the 
supervision of a board elected by the qualified elec- 
tors of the township. The schools are maintained 
by a tax levied on the entire township. In many 
states operating under this system all incorporated 
towns and cities are set apart as separate districts. 

Township schools in Indiana are under the man- 
agement of the trustee, elected for four years. He 
employs teachers, establishes schools, provides build- 
ings and equipment and regulates the school work. 
This plan as operated in Indiana is open to some of 
the same criticism as is the district plan. Any plan 
that places its schools in the hands of one official 
without requiring definite qualifications of this 
official is far from being ideal. It is possible under 
the Indiana plan for the trustee to be a man of low 
educational ideals and no educational ideas. He is 
elected by popular vote and is, as is frequently al- 
leged, elected for his business integrity rather than 
for his knowledge of educational matters. 

In the New England states the township system 
is under the management of a board called the 



SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS 267 

"Town School Committee." The Town School Com- 
mittee has jurisdiction over the rural, town, village 
and city schools of the township, managing all as a 
unit. District boundaries have been preserved for 
facilitating classifications, but they are boundaries 
fixed by the will of the committee and changed when- 
ever expedient. Schools may be closed by the com- 
mittee and pupils transported to other schools. The 
committee makes all contracts, hires and pays 
teachers and maintains graded schools and a central 
high school. 

The main difference between the Indiana system 
and the New England system is that the former does 
not have managerial jurisdiction of the incorporated 
towns. Throughout the north central states where 
the township unit is in operation incorporated towns 
are under separate control. 

Separate control for incorporated towns is as 
unjust as the district plan, in that it prevents the 
equal distribution of taxes. In certain townships 
working under this plan, a city of 40,000 or more 
may be found in one township, and the territory 
under township control is but a rim around the city 
— a straggling territory and of comparatively small 
tax value. The advantages of the Indiana system 
over the district system are those due to a larger unit 
of management. While it is superior to the district 
system it is open to the criticism that it is not 



268 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

economical nor effective tx> separate supervision from 
management. The New England plan has probably 
given better satisfaction, as everywhere the results 
have been pronounced good. 

Under the township system the schools are 
managed as a unit, educational advantages and taxes 
are equalized, better teachers are secured, more sani- 
tary conditions are maintained, courses of study en- 
riched, consolidation promoted, and the supervision 
—while not perfect— is far superior to that of the 
district system. 

In the effort to secure a larger school unit some 
have been inclined to offer the state as the unit. It 
would seem that the state as a unit is open to certain 
criticism that cannot be offered on the county as 
a unit. 

A state department of education is too far re- 
moved from the fields of activity to do sufficiently 
effective work in either a managerial or supervisory 
sense (this statement applies specifically to rural 
schools.) As advisory officials they have and will 
continue to render a valuable service, and in Kansas 
it is doing a great work in directing legislation 
and in helping solve rural school problems. To its 
activities more than any other agency is due our 
rapid growth in rural high schools, and higher stand- 
ards for certification of teachers, and the strengthen- 
ing of the state department of education is of vital 



SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS 269 

concern to the educational progress of the state, but 
for efficient, economical, consistent and progressive 
administration of the rural schools the unit lies 
between the township and the state. 

The county system is in operation in Utah, 
Louisiana and Maryland, and is found in modified 
forms in several other states. 

The common plan is to' have the county con- 
trolled by a board of five elected by the people. The 
county superintendent is appointed by this board, as 
are also the deputy supervisors. Their organization is 
similar to our city school organizations. The county 
superintendent's work is analogous to that of the 
city superintendent's, and the deputies' to that of 
supervising principals'. Like a city board of educa- 
tion, this board determines the educational policy, 
manages the schools and abolishes or consolidates 
school districts when in their judgment it is in the 
interests of better education, employs and pays 
teachers, appropriates all funds, determines length 
of school term, and like the township board, provides 
equal educational advantages for the pupils through- 
out the county. 

This is considered the most efficient system of 
school administration and under it greater educa- 
tional progress is possible than under either the dis- 
trict or township plan. 

One of the greatest defects in the rural schools 



270 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

is the lack of supervision that comes from lack of 
organization. It is evident that our rural teachers 
are inefficient — that there is ever the danger of in- 
efficiency in the district board; but waiving these 
objections and conceding that all rural teachers are 
efficient, and that every board member is an educa- 
tional expert, these would not insure an effective 
organization, because under such a system there is 
no large directing force such as is required for the 
intelligent conduct of large business. 

Under the county plan the supervising officer at 
once becomes an administrative officer. The unit 
is too large for one supervising officer, and so is a 
city of 200,000 too large, but with assistant super- 
visors it is of workable proportions. 

It is also a better plan for taxation. It gives all 
the county the benefit of all the tax on all the prop- 
erty of the county. Incidentally it is well to> note 
that this equitable distribution of taxes is the real 
barrier in the way of the county unit. Favored dis- 
tricts that have been permitted through the present 
pernicious systems to almost escape taxation because 
of large corporation interests in their districts are 
most potent factors in preventing legislation that 
will bring about a just system of taxation. It is 
impossible in a brief discussion of this subject to 
more than cite an instance of the unjust distribution 
of tax in the state. That it is necessary in one rural 



SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS 271 

district to levy seventeen mills in order that it can 
have a seven months' school and unnecessary in 
another to levy more than two-tenths of a mill to 
have a nine months' school should leave grounds for 
believing that those who are so wrongfully discrimi- 
nated against are bearing a burden which would be 
borne with justice to all if the proper unit of taxation 
were adopted, and with a distribution of the burden 
would come a distribution of opportunity for all 
children and especially for those who because of a 
crazy-patch division of the county into small districts 
by the "Dido" practices of early day politicians have 
been deprived of as good opportunities as those 
offered pioneer settlers a century ago. 

In 39 states the county is the unit of supervision. 
The weakness of this supervision is that there is no 
connection between it and administration. These 
should be closely united. A supervisory officer with- 
out administrative power is helpless. 

The farmer boy beyond the eighth grade should 
not be compelled to be in school between April i 
and December i, or more than four and a half months 
in the year. The average farmer needs his boys 
during that period. Under the present system he is 
deprived of his help from September i to the middle 
of May. 

In the spring, when crops are to be planted, the 
farmer is without help unless he hires it. In the 



272 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

months of September, October and November, when 
fall crops are to be planted, feed cut, and corn gath- 
ered, he must hire help or allow his business to suffer. 
In all accredited high schools at least two courses 
are maintained, one a college preparatory course and 
the other a general course. The college preparatory 
course is the main course — one or two other studies 
not required of college preparatory students make up 
the general course. True, the general course has 
more than two subjects, but the remainder of that 
course is made up of college preparatory subjects 
with the same exactions that are required for college 
preparatory work. For illustration, algebra is a 
college preparatory subject and a general course 
subject. It becomes one and the same subject in a 
particular high school. Accredited relations require 
it to be pursued nine months one year and four and 
one-half months another year. This one year begins 
about September i and ends the middle or latter part 
of May. By this arrangement the boy who is not 
preparing for college who can be in school but a 
few months each year, the very boy for whom this 
course is intended must adjust his business to meet 
the same conditions met by the boy who 1 is preparing 
for college. He must enter high school during a 
busy season if he would take the work at all. He 
must remain in school during a busy season or he 
is required to repeat the work the following year. 



SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS 273 

This is a glaring injustice to the* farmer boy and one 
that should be speedily remedied. As indicated 
above a course of study should be planned permitting 
this boy to enter school after the busy season and 
stop when spring farm work requires his services. 

i\t first it would appear that this cannot be done. 
It can be done. The short course, subjects that are 
also college credit subjects could be completed in two, 
three or four years, and the work can be done almost 
as satisfactorily as is done by students in the college 
preparatory department. This means, too, that these 
boys would get an education without being weaned 
away from the farm. It would also mean that 
should one of these boys conclude later that he 
wanted to go to college, he has made some college 
preparation without sacrificing his business. It 
might further mean that his going to college would 
be attended with the intention of one day returning 
to the farm for his life work. Taking a boy from 
his business nine months each year between the ages 
of twelve and seventeen destroys his interest in that 
business and is one of the factors that determine the 
away- from- the- farm movement of so many boys. 

If the high school would minister to the needs 
of the rural boy as indicated above it might help 
thousands where it is now helping but hundreds. 
It will be argued that such a plan would be very 
expensive. The present plan that neglects to edu- 
18 



274 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

cate a boy whose parent is taxed for the support of 
an institution whose benefit he cannot have without 
neglecting and injuring his business is very expen- 
sive. The rural school should run nine months. The 
children up to and including the eighth grade should 
be compelled to attend the nine months. The rural 
high school should accommodate those who want 
to do college preparatory work, but a distinct course 
in such a high school should be the short course, 
and the utmost vigilance should be exercised that 
the curriculum be not prostituted to do service to 
colleges and other higher institutions of learning. 

The most wonderful question concerning rural 
schools is less wonderful than the blundering at- 
tempts that are being made to remedy rural school 
conditions. What rural schools need to-day is 
legislators who recognize their needs, who recognize 
the injustice of the present administration of rural 
schools, and who believe that rural children have cer- 
tain inalienable rights and have parents who are as 
self-sacrificing as any class of people on earth. 

The sub- freshman departments in the several 
state educational institutions and denominational 
schools testify to the shortcomings of the high 
schools. Men of mature age are making college 
preparation in those schools because at the high 
school age they were not able to avail themselves 
of the accommodations offered by their home high 



SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS 275 

schools. Many of these men, later realizing the im- 
portance of an education, attend these preparatory 
schools, where they find plenty of associates of their 
own age. Had these short courses been maintained in 
their home high schools they might not have quit 
school until they had finished a part or all of the 
college preparatory courses at home. 

It should be thoroughly understood that the short 
course is not intended as the course for those who 
can take a full high school course, but to serve those 
who without it would be deprived of any high school 
training. The completion of the course could be 
equal to only one-half of a four years' course. 

The great need of the rural young man to-day 
is that the state shall take proper recognition of his 
educational problems. He knows what he needs, 
and he knows it better than do those who insist on 
giving him what he does not want. He needs a 
school that he may attend when he can without 
jeopardizing his interest in his life work. 

In educational legislation there is little recogni- 
tion of the injustice of the present administration of 
high schools for the benefit of rural pupils. There 
is considerable agitation about consolidation, but 
there is little or no effort to use to the advantage 
of the boy who cannot attend school for nine months 
each year the high schools already in operation and 
operated at the expense of the county at large. 



276 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

Much needless energy is wasted in attempts to 
" rescue " the rural boy without considering his great 
economic needs. Rural schools for rural people, and 
a part of the curriculum of town high schools for 
rural people, when rural people are taxed for the 
maintenance of town high schools, Would be but 
simple justice and the benefits incalculable. 

One of the troubles of the high school of to-day 
is over-organization. The curricula are often built 
with automatic interlocking devices and for their 
symmetry or architectural beauty, rather than for 
their utility, and then the interests of the pupil are 
sacrificed on the altar of 'classification. 

The suggested curriculum will require about the 
same number of teachers as are required under pres- 
ent plans. Students taking the short course will 
each year complete a definite amount of work, and if 
at the beginning of any year they conclude to change 
to the regular college preparatory course, they may 
do so without loss of time. The short course is 
designed primarily for those who want and need 
more school work than they are now getting, but 
cannot obtain it under existing conditions, and at 
the same time it is so* designed that it will be hurtful 
to none and helpful to many. By this arrangement 
high schools will become in fact, " schools for all the 
people," and a rural uplift will be installed and a 
real barrier to rural progress removed. 



SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS 



277 



A Suggested Curriculum for High Schools in Towns 
Less Than 2500 Population 



first year 



Fall 


Winter 


Spring 


3 months 


4J£ months 


i.J-2 months 


German I or Latin I' 


German I or Latin I 


German I or Latin I 


English I 


English I* 


English I 


Bookkeeping 


Farm Accounts* 
Algebra* 


Bookkeeping 


Ancient History 


Ancient History 


Ancient History 


Physical Geography 




Physical Geography 


Elementary Science 


Mechanical Draw- 
ing* 
Manual Training* 
Cooking * 
Sewing* 
Agriculture* 


Elementary Science 


Music 


Music* 


Music 





SECOND YEAR 




German II or Latin II 


German IIorLatinll 


German II or Latin II 


English II 


English II* 


English II 


Algebra I 


Algebra I and II 
Algebra to Quad- 
ratics* 


Algebra II 


M. and M. History 


M. and M. History 


M. and M. History 




Botany* 


Botany 


Mechanical Drawing 


Mechanical Draw- 


Mechanical Drawing 


Manual Training 


ing 
Manual Training* 


Manual Training 


Cooking 


Cooking* 


Cooking 


Sewing 


Sewing 


Sewing 


Agriculture 


Agriculture* 


Agriculture 


Music 


Music* 


Music 



: Classes designed for both short course and regular students. 



278 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 



THIRD YEAR 



Fall 


Winter 


Spring 


3 months 


4K months 


iK months 


German III or Latin 


German III or Latin 


German III or Latin 


III 


III 


III 


English III 
Commercial 


English III* 


English III 
Commercial 


Arithmetic 
Plane Geometry 

Botany 
Psychology 

Mechanical Drawing 


Plane Geometry 
Plane Geometry* 
Physiology* 

Physics I* 
Mechanical 
Drawing* 


Arithmetic 
Plane Geometry 

Psychology 
Physics 
Mechanical Drawing 


Manual Training 

Cooking 

Sewing 

Agriculture 

Music 


Manual Training* 

Cooking* 

Sewing* 

Agriculture* 

Music* 


Manual Training 

Cooking 

Sewing 

Agriculture 

Music 



FOURTH YEAR 



Electives from first, second and third years 

English* 
Vocational 

Arithmetic* 
Solid Geometry 
American History 
American History* 
Civics* 
Normal Training 

Review 
Methods and Management and Arithmetic 



American History 



Physics 



Music 



Mechanical 
Drawing* 
Manual Training* 
Cooking* 
Sewing* 
Agriculture* 
Music* 



Music 



SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS 279 

In explanation of the curriculum it will be help- 
ful to indicate how the students in the several courses 
may arrange their work. It is assumed that in a par- 
ticular high school Latin is the foreign language and 
that we have three classes of students : College Pre- 
paratory, General Course and Short Course, which 
we will designate respectively A, B and C. The 
school year is divided into three terms : fall term, 
three months; winter term, four and one-half 
months, and spring term, one and one-half months. 

Student A 

First Year : 

Latin, three terms. 

Physical Geography, Elementary Science or Bookkeeping, 

fall term. 
Ancient History, three terms. 
Algebra I, winter term, and Elementary Science, Physical 

Geography or Bookkeeping, spring term. 
English, three terms. 

Second Year: 

Latin, three terms. 
M. and M. History, three terms. 
Botany, winter and spring terms. 
Algebra, three terms. 
English, three terms. 

(It will be observed that students will be required to 
carry five studies the winter and spring terms in the second 
year. If the student is taking Normal Training, voca- 
tional electives from the first and second years should be 
substituted for M. and M. History.) 



280 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

Third Year: 

Latin, three terms. 

Botany, fall term; Physics, winter and spring terms. 

Plane Geometry, three terms. 

English, three terms. 

(If the student is taking the Normal Training Course, 
Psychology, fall term, Physiology, winter term, and Psy- 
chology, spring term, will be substituted for Latin.) 

Fourth Year: 

American History, three terms. 

Electives from first, second and third years. 

Physics, fall term, Civics, winter term, and Solid Geometry 

Elective. _ _ 

Student B 

Sixteen units are required for graduation, all of which 
shall be elective excepting two years of English, one year 
of Mathematics, one year of American History, and one- 
half year of Civics. 

Student C 
Eight units* are required for graduation from the 
Short Course. 
First Year, Winter Term: 
Algebra. 

English Composition. 

Two electives from the following group: Farm Account- 
ing, Manual Training and Mechanical Drawing, Agri- 
culture I, Domestic Science I, and Domestic Art I. 
Second Year, Winter Term. 
Botany. 

Algebra to quadratics. 
English. 

One elective from the following group : Manual Training 
and Mechanical Drawing II, Agriculture II, Domestic 
Science II, and Domestic Art II. (Electives may also 
be taken from the group in first year.) 

*A unit is one subject carried nine months, five forty- 
five minute recitations per week. 



SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS 281 

Third Year, Winter Term: 

English III* 

Three Electives from the following group: Physiology, 
Physics, Plane Geometry, Agriculture, Mechanical Draw- 
ing and Manual Training, or Home Economics. 

Fourth Year, Winter Term: 
Civics. 
English. 
Arithmetic. 
American Plistory. 

Farm Management or Home Management 
Mechanical Drawing or Manual Training. 

In choosing electives from the subjects designated as 

I, II, or III, I must be considered as a prerequisite of 

II, and II a prerequisite of III. 

Music shall be offered as an elective to all students and 
they shall receive one-half the credit given for a " solid." 

This suggested curriculum for rural high 
schools will not, as arranged, meet the conditions 
of all places, nor can a curriculum that is suited to 
all places be made. It is desirable in so far as is 
possible or practical to have uniformity, but when 
uniformity is antagonistic to the interests of a com- 
munity, uniformity should be sacrificed. 

* It will be observed that some classes beginning in tne 
fall, e.g., English, permit students to enter in the winter term. 
In such a case the work in the fall and spring is principally 
literature, but during the winter term English composition. 



CHAPTER XXI 
Our Teacher 

The lack of harmony between the child's nature 
and his needs is largely responsible for the strong 
desire of so many to leave school early. This also 
has much to answer for as regards his behavior while 
in school. Superintendents of reform schools and 
reformatories have experiences that should bring the 
blush to those who are responsible for the public 
school. 

Many a boy is taken from his home and his 
home school because he is incorrigible, and when 
taken to one of the above industrial institutions at 
once conforms to the rules and regulations and is 
pronounced number one in deportment and studies. 

The mistake is often the teacher, but more fre- 
quently it is the curriculum. The boy of twelve to 
fourteen is not likely to have an objective interest, 
especially if such an interest be very remote. In my 
first experience as a teacher I was far from satisfied 
with the results. My regard for the pupils was so 
high that after all these years I think of none of 
them but with pleasure. My two inflictions of 
corporal punishment, to which I have alluded in 
former chapters, are not half of all the corporal pun- 

282 



OUR TEACHER 283 

ishments that I have given in twenty-five years, but 
in the light of past experience I can see no reason to 
regret those punishments, although regrets for many 
things that I did not do are innumerable. 

In not accepting the school for the second year, 
I refused on the grounds that I was unprepared for 
the work. In this school there was a large primary 
class, and I had done no more for them in nine 
months than a good primary teacher could do in 
nine days. The difference between what I did and 
what a good teacher could have done was greater 
than would appear at first sight. What they had 
been taught was very little, and that little was so 
imperfectly done that it would be a real impediment 
to future progress. At the close of the school my 
beginning class could not read and they could not 
spell. They knew their letters but they could not 
use them. 

I have seen several good primary teachers and I 
have seen scores of very poor primary teachers. 
When I see a poor one I think of my first work in 
teaching, of those little boys and girls whose mothers 
dressed them and prepared their dinners for them 
for nine months, trusting to me " to get them 
started." One mother, who had more sense than 
the teacher and the other mothers, became so ex- 
asperated at having her son kept on the first ten or 
twelve pages for six or seven months that she took 



284 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

the book and put it on the sewing machine, quilting 
the first few leaves together so that the teacher could 
not use those pages any more. She was right. Her 
provocation was great enough to justify the act. 
How trying on a parent's patience is a poor teacher ! 

I loved those children and they loved me, and the 
affection between us lasted until they were men and 
women grown, but love is not all that is necessary 
to insure sound primary work. 

Our neighbor's daughter may have a good, sweet 
disposition, the children may love her and run to 
meet her ; yet, she may not be a good primary teacher. 
She may be a " great hand " with children and be a 
complete failure as a primary teacher. In no depart- 
ment of the school has there been greater imposition 
than in the primary department. In no other depart- 
ment is it so easy to escape detection until after the 
damage is done. So much work that is not educa- 
tion — that leads nowhere and aims at nothing— that 
is showy and entertaining, but does not hitch up to 
anything, passes for " good primary work." 

Among our best trained teachers are found the 
kindergarten and the primary teacher, and there is 
no other school work that is more important than 
that done by them. 

Average school boards know but little of the 
selection of a primary teacher. (This remark has 
no special reference to rural school boards.) 



OUR TEACHER 285 

The trained teacher is needed, however, in other 
places. A child may have had good training in the 
first and second and third grades and get into in- 
competent hands and be spoiled in grades five and 
six. Indeed, grades five and six need experts, but 
for unexplainable reasons there is less expert teach- 
ing in grades five and six than is done either above or 
below those grades. A pupil that is well taught in 
grades one, two and three may be spoiled in the 
upper grades, but a child spoiled in grades one, two 
or three is a difficult proposition ever afterwards. 

My success was not marked in any of the grades, 
but was simply poorer in some than in others. 

For fear the reader may lay too great stress upon 
training, a thing which I believe is sometimes done, 
I must make clear my position. 

If it is impossible to have a trained teacher who 
is in sympathy with child life I would favor the 
untrained teacher who has sympathy. I believe that 
loving sympathy is the highest qualification of the 
teacher. While this statement will not always meet 
with favor it will be quite generally welcomed. 
There are those who believe sympathy and soft- 
heartedness are certain to degenerate into mawkish 
coquetry, sentimentalism and weak discipline. If 
ever so, it is due to emotional rather than intelligent 
application. 

To those of us who plead for a discipline of the 



286 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

good old kind it must be gratifying to know that 
we have an ancestry in every preceding generation 
since historical records began who have pleaded for 
a discipline of the good old days, who have said that 
the more lenient ideals and methods of school and 
home discipline are operating to increase disrespect 
for law. In every generation the conservatives 
have proclaimed that disaster is certain to come from 
the " new " practices, and in 1847 the Annals of the 
American Institute of Instruction contained a com- 
plaint on the laxity in the schools of that period, 
saying: " It is to this new-fashioned laxity of rule 
that we may impart much of the insubordination 
and riot, yes, even ' Lynch Law/ which has crept 
into our schools and families, as well as pervaded 
like a pestilence over our states." 

I believe that love for the teacher is one of the 
prerequisites of learning, and that it is possible for 
one who possesses a teacher's qualifications to have 
this love. So much will be done for the child who 
has a kind and sympathizing teacher that cannot be 
done for it by the teacher who is selfish and cruel 
by nature. The real teacher knows that nothing 
trifling forms part of a child's life. The whole 
principle of Froebel's teaching is founded upon per- 
fect love for children, and it is this love that every 
true teacher must strive to possess. " Our Teacher ' 
should be second only to " Our Mother." Fond are 



OUR TEACHER 287 

the recollections that I have of many of my teachers 
and of the happy schooldays spent with them. But 
there are other days that I would forget, if in the 
forgetting I lost not a sympathy for those whose lives 
fall in unhappy places. 

I have sat for days, weeks and months on seats 
so high that my little short legs didn't reach half 
way to the floor; I have waded snowdrifts and 
reached school with frozen feet and ears, and found 
the smoking stove surrounded by other pupils as 
miserable as myself. I've seen it all. I have vivid 
recollections of the woman teacher who kept the 
little girl for a whole day standing on the floor for 
an offense so slight that it should have escaped 
notice. I have seen them all. I feel personally ac- 
quainted with all the teachers whose hides were so 
beautifully tanned by that master dermatist, Charles 
Dickens ; but the King of Beasts for whom no gener- 
ation since the days of Herod could offer a reason- 
able excuse, taught our little district school in no 
earlier a year than 1878. Even then, or yet, there 
was an insane desire to vote the minimum levy and 
get teachers who would " skin them alive." In that 
little summer school, with a dozen or fifteen pupils, 
this man, unmolested by parents who believed all the 
old adages and prayed for more, held a reign of 
terror. His old hickory pointers, scraped with glass 
and sandpapered to a glossy smoothness, constituted 



288 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

the major portion of his assets. I can hear his song 
(why God gave him a voice for singing I cannot 
tell) " Maine, Augusta on the Kennebec River; Ver- 
mont, Montpelier, on the Onion River; Massachu- 
setts, Boston, on the Boston Harbor." 

While I would forget, I remember that teacher's 
geography. I remember his big white-handled knife 
that he used in pointing to the letters of the alphabet 
as I stood by his side. I remember, too, how afraid 
I was that he might shift his heavy boots and get on 
my bare feet. Bare feet are usually hurtable, and 
boys' feet in the early springtime are quite tender. 
Usually there's a sore place, too — the place cut by 
the broken glass, or the place where the locust thorn 
went in. I think it was his utter lack of sympathy 
and my intense fear of him, that caused me on my 
first day of teaching, when I called my little Leonard 
and Johnnie up " to say their letters " to put my 
arms around each one and asked them to do the 
pointing. It was his frowns and growls that I 
occasioned when I called " d " " b " that caused me 
to tell Leonard that he probably never would be able 
to tell them apart, that I never had quite straightened 
them out. I knew nothing about development les- 
sons, but because that teacher had not helped me to 
learn " d " from " b " we went into it. We had 
comparison and differentiation right there, and we 
all learned the difference between " d " and " b," and 



OUR TEACHER 289 

it " stuck," too. Why boys should ever borrow a 
knife from a man whom they so thoroughly feared 
as we did him, I have never been quite able to 
explain. We did borrow it, however, and there 
hang-s a tale. 

I am not a generous man, but I have spent much 
money for knives. I have made many Christmas 
presents of knives to little boys, and if I think the 
little girl doesn't need a doll too badly I get her a 
knife, too. The first thought I have about a boy 
after I get enough clothes on him to keep him from 
freezing is to give him a knife. 

As superintendent I have had occasion to check 
children upon their pilfering. I never made an 
announcement of the fact, but every boy who stole 
a knife and admitted to me that he did steal it got 
from somewhere a knife that he didn't have to steal. 
Well, we borrowed his knife; technically, I guess we 
stole it. He was not at the desk when we got it, and 
we only intended to use it in cutting a willow for a 
whistle. I hate a willow whistle worse than I hate 
white-handled knives. 

Now, these willows were in the ravine not over 
thirty rods from the schoolhouse, and when we re- 
turned with our willows we were minus the knife. 
Louie said, " You put it in your pocket." The only 
thing in that pocket was a hole. Money and other 
valuables never stay very long in my pockets, but 

19 



290 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

that's the last time anything ever went out of my 
pocket by way of a hole. 

The absolute terror that beset us when we found 
that the knife was lost would be difficult for anyone 
who has not had such a teacher to comprehend. Our 
first thought was to run away. We did run away. 
Thus the road downward begins. To make our 
homecoming timely we waited all afternoon in the 
woods. I say waited. We did not play. A little 
boy put his hand just over his solar plexus one day 
and said, " Mr. , when you feel bad about some- 
thing, it's right here, isn't it?" I said, "Yes, sir, 
that's just the place." I remember the afternoon 
in the woods with thievery and truancy to be atoned, 
and in childish fear I was directly headed for Jack- 
sonville, asylum for the insane, or Joliet, the state 
penitentiary. The day following we feigned sick- 
ness, but that could not be kept up. The third day 
found us both in school. After a usual amount of 
lying we received our punishment. The old two- 
piece stuff — denim waists and pants that button — 
is not much protection against the onslaughts of a 
merciless, strong man, and readers who believe in 
children believe me when I say that when we ex- 
amined our bare legs in the only privacy offered the 
children of a free and prosperous people, and saw 
the blood that streamed from the cuts made by his 
stick, we were glad it was not so bad after all, and 



OUR TEACHER 291 

that maybe we would not have to go to Jacksonville 
or Joliet either one. Certainly our sins had been 
atoned ! 

Hundreds of times my teachers have had com- 
plaints from parents, have had insulting or censor- 
ious notes. It has always been my policy to say to 
that teacher, " A soft answer turneth away wrath. 
Be thankful the child has parents who love him and 
want to protect him and see that he gets a square 
deal." It is not our fault that the parent feels as he 
does. Nor is it the parent's fault. He is simply 
acting according to his light. He has grown up 
among conditions that fully warrant his antagonism. 

As a teacher you are kind, merciful, self-sacrific- 
ing. The parent who is criticising you is basing her 
opinion upon the old-time school when our children 
were mistreated, often most cruelly. 

I do not mean to moralize, but I must not drop 
this thought till I have said, " I never conferred with 
a parent about his child, whether the child were right 
or wrong, but I made a friend of both parent and 
child/'' The natural parent loves his child, and in the 
Book of Books there is not a truer statement than 
" love begets love," nor that " a little leaven 
leaveneth the whole lump." 

In writing of the rural teacher there is great 
danger of overlooking the many earnest and capable 
ones who would make good but for the system under 



292 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

which they work. When they begin they work un- 
supervised and unaided. In other business no* greater 
success would be realized if conditions were similar. 

The sacrificing, painstaking, hard-working 
teacher is found nowhere more often than in the 
little one-room rural school. 

Whenever I hear the city teacher complaining of 
her lot, railing at the street commissioners for the 
snow on the walks, at the janitors for the dust on 
her desk and the freezing temperature when the 
mercury drops below' 68 degrees, and at her principal 
for not disciplining her room, I am reminded of the 
little women, as well-born and as accustomed to 
well appointed and luxurious homes as herself, who 
find their ways to* school through rivers of mud and 
mountains of snow, wondering " who shall roll us 
away the stone " and find their fires unstarted, rooms 
undusted and later meet everyone with a cheerful 
" good morning " and a smile. Charge not all the 
inefficiency of the rural school to the teacher, but to 
the system under which she works. 

To the rural teacher: 

You may be teaching your first school and are 
probably but twenty years old, maybe less. You are 
miles from home and from your county superin- 
tendent. You have had to make your own programs, 
and have had to do a thousand things that are 
baffling good city superintendents. If you get 



OUR TEACHER 293 

through this year and show that you are capable 
and able to run a school alone, next year you may 
work in a city school, have eight recitations per 
day instead of twenty-eight, and have a superinten- 
dent to plan all your work and stand between you and 
all trouble. In other words, when it is ascertained 
that you can get along without any help you will be 
given it. 

You are holding the hardest position in the school 
system. You are doing more work and getting less 
pay than teachers in graded schools. Do you appre- 
ciate the great responsibilities resting upon you? 
You may get discouraged sometimes, and it would be- 
a wonder if you did not. 

But there is another side. Too much cannot 
be said of the beautiful silver lining of the many 
clouds that sometimes hang over the teacher's world. 
In the teacher's life there is a greater radiance of 
the beautiful and the good than may be found in 
any other vocation. Many helpful books have been 
written dealing with the beauty side, the real love 
side, of the teacher's life. There is world-wide room 
for the teacher with good common sense and a loving, 
sympathetic heart. In support of the above senti- 
ment I give the following little story told by a promi- 
nent American citizen, now dead, whose name is 
purposely omitted. 

" In a backwoods settlement in an eastern state, 



294 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

I began life where good schools were unknown. Our 
teachers were hired for their muscularity rather 
than for their educational attainment or for their 
ability to teach, and usually distinguished themselves 
for ignorance, general inefficiency and brutality. 

" On a February morning our little school was 
opening for its third time that winter. The two men 
who had attempted to direct us in the narrow path 
by the only methods then in vogue had found life in 
this out-of-the-way place too strenuous and haz- 
ardous, and we were for the third time that winter 
mobilizing our allied forces for defense. 

" To our mortification the invasion of our terri- 
tory was made by a body so inferior in size and so — 
well ! our new teacher was a woman ! She did not 
look very strong, was rather pale, and with boyish 
foresight we saw our cause for battling had been 
removed. To oppose such a teacher we must in- 
vent a cause and employ different tactics. 

" She opened school by a friendly greeting; she 
alluded not to our past ; she made no> rules nor made 
known any plans. She told us that little work would 
be attempted that day, but that she would try to find 
out about us and our work, in hopes that on the 
morrow she as well as we would be prepared. 

" She sat down by a pretty little girl, learned 
her name, where she lived; she passed on and on 
about the room getting acquainted, making little 



OUR TEACHER 295 

assignments — making friends. Soon we saw that 
there was fun or trouble ahead. She was just about 
to little ' Red Top ' Briggs. * Red Top ' was there — 
dirt, rags and onions. The new teacher would never 
sit by him ! But she did. She learned his name, she 
looked through his dirty, torn old book — she learned 
more than his name — she learned that his father and 
mother were dead, and that he lived ' nowhere very 
much.' 

" When she arose to leave little 'Red Top ' Briggs 
she smoothed from his unwashed forehead some 
matted locks and tenderly kissed the face that never 
before had been lighted with a smile. No one 
laughed. 

" In years to come it was my pleasure to be 
honored by and to be presented to the governor of 
one of our leading states. This governor was the 
little red-headed boy who ate onions for breakfast, 
washed at the creek, and lived ' nowhere very much ! ' 
We discussed matters of state, upon few of which 
we agreed, but our little teacher, then dead, was the 
one topic upon which there was no division. Of 
her we spoke in loving remembrance and upon that 
occasion we financed the project which resulted in 
erecting in honor of ' Our Teacher ' a monument 
equaled by none in that old churchyard over the 
remains of the woman who had given life to two 



296 THE RURAL SCHOOL FROM WITHIN 

forsaken, homeless boys — she who had been, but 
never was, a mother." 

It's easy to love the little girl with the pretty 
curls and ribbons, it's easy to love the pretty little 
boy with dimples that are angel kissed, the Golden 
Locks and Little Lord Fauntleroys, who live in the 
big white houses on the hills and who bring the 
biggest red apples to put on teacher's desk; but to 
love the Ruggleses and the Wiggses, the Oliver 
Twists, and the Smikes, the Betsy Shorts and the 
Shockeys, children who live " nowhere very much," 
the teacher must have met face to face with the 
Teacher who said, "Suffer the little children, and for- 
bid them not, to come unto me, for of such is the 
kingdom of heaven." 



INDEX 



Activity, occasioning the 
proper, 200 

Adversary, to public schools, 
106 

Advertising the cities' great- 
ness, 166; legitimate, 169; 
as related to her farms, 173 

Affection of children, 231, 232 

Affiliations, church and 
Y.M.C.A., 165 

Agriculture, prevailing type of, 
87, 249, 264 

Agricultural college, 87 

Anger, 41 

Arithmetics, adopted because 
of excellent rules, 207 

Army of the unemployed, 
Chicago, Philadelphia, and 
St. Louis, 166, 167 

Arrested development, 181 

Attitude, personal or objec- 
tive, 61; objective, 78 

Automobiles, 35 

B 

"Backfiring,' 5 98 
Back seat a seat of honor, 63 
Band, the school, 219, 220 
Bible stories, 197 
Big business, 167 
Billboards, 170, 172 
Blizzard, the, 152, 153 
Boarding place, 11, 29 
Boards of education, 43, 191, 

194 
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 65 
Booth, Edwin, 115 
Bossing the school board, 40 



Botany, 71 
Brooms, 43 
Burns, 31-33 
Busy work, 48 



Calvin, John, 65 

Chemistry, 71 

Christmas tree, 142, 143, 146; 
gifts, 144 

Church, agency to civiliza- 
tion, 92; opposition to, 93; 
a passive membership in, 15; 
rural, 87, 97, 103 

Cicero, 64 

City, drift of rural people to, 
234; schools, superiority of, 
236; teacher, 19, 162; un- 
attractiveness, 161, 255; 
wrong in permitting bad 
labor conditions, 169 

Closing school with a song, 62 

Community center, 86, 94, 96, 
178, 179 

Community interests, 152, 157 

Conditions which we should 
improve, 154 

Conduct, bad, rewarded with 
a smile, 42 

Conferring with parent, 291 

Consolidation, 256, 257, 260; 
arguments in favor of, 262, 
263; questionnaire regard- 
ing, 261 

Constad's Crossing, 36; 
Crossing "tree," 143; Cross- 
ing school house, 86; Cross- 
ing neighborhood, 87,97; re- 
ligious harvest, 88 

297 



298 



INDEX 



Constad, William, 78, 81, 125, 
126 

Controlling forces of the boy, 

119 
Cooperation, 173 
Corporal punishment, 53, 56, 
^282 

Country, the ideal place, 151 
Country, picnic, a, 179; the 

dinner at, 180 
County superintendent, 55; 

how elected in the county 

plan, 269 
County system, 257, 259; 

method of control in, 269; 

method of control in 39 

states, 271 
Courses of study introduced 

after decades of agitation, 

233» 256, 272 
Criminal, the, 108 
Culture and work have been 

differentiated, 240 
Culture, lack of, 245; oppor- 
tunity for, 162 
Curriculum, suggested, 276, 

281; often the mistake, 282 
Currying favor, 39 

D 

Daughters, bossing the board, 

43 
Demands upon farmers' time, 

136 

Desire to excel, 178 

Development arrested, 123 

Dickens, as an educator, 45, 

115 

Dick Holmes, 50 
Dictionary, 60, 83, 89 
Discipline, kept even or level, 

50; girls amenable to, 58, 68; 

negative, 123; plead for a, 

286 
Dismissal, orderly, 52 
District system, 257-259 



Domestic science and art, 71, 

264 
Down at the cross, 36, 39 

E 

Easy steps to learning, 212; 
importance of, 93; new, 120 

Education, higher, 71, 2(?o; a 
common school, enough for 
my son, 236; not for the 
avoidance of work, 240; not 
measured by yards, 246; 
more than a local interest, 
259; State Department of, 

^268 

Educational purposes, 90 

Educators, reducing schools to 
machines, 177 

Employee, not in a position to 
see the other side, 41 

Employment, futile attempts 
to secure, 168 

Enthusiasm of youth, 38 

Environment, determines dis- 
position, 74 

Examination, teachers', 190 

Exhibitions, school, 174; not 
literary or artistic, 176; de- 
noted year's success, 178 

Experience, a teacher's, 161; 
a personal, 189, 190 



Failures in life, not all among 
the poor, 225 

Farm, back to the, 160; oppor- 
tunity to remain on, 234 

Farmer, dependent socially, 
106; as manager, 138 

Farming, scientific, 87; an ex- 
acting business, 137; offers 
time for improvement, 233 

Farm life, unattractiveness 
grows less, 169 

Father and Mother Rose, 29, 
33. 92, 99, 154, 155, 183, 199 



INDEX 



299 



Father's advice, 41 

Faults, 32 

Fidelity and efficiency not 

sufficient, 167 
First day, the, 38 
Fond recollections, 14 
Formal discipline, 202 
Formal grammar, 203 
Franklin, Benjamin, 120 
Friends and enemies, 18 
Friendship that would divide 

another's sorrow, 158 
Froebel, 286 
Funeral, the, 156 

G 

Games in rural schools, 222 
Geography, 212-214 
Girls, 21, 23, 58, 59 
Good beginning, 38 
Good deeds unappreciated, 

55, 128, 176, 223 
Gordons, 31, 34 
Graham, Jack, 98 
Gymnasium, 70 

H 

Hamlet, 75 

Hannibal, 65 

Heating plant, 70 

High schools, 238, 239 

History, teachers no longer 
specializing in, 214, 215; in- 
terest in, through historical 
romance, 197; my love for, 
228 

Home, the, 93 

Homes that are not homes, 226 



Ideals, helpful and beautiful, 

36, 175 

Impression, making an, 44 
Improvement of cattle, 81 
Improvements of cattle sug- 
gested, 81, 256 



Incorporated towns, separate 
control for, 267 

Indian Creek, 178-180 

Inefficiency our greatest eco- 
nomic liability, 168 

Institutions, higher, 71, 274 

Interest, objective or subjec- 
tive, 151 

Interest to the child, 198; learn- 
ing the legitimate offspring 
of, 198 

Irving, Washington, 121 



Janitor, 13, 153 
Jones, 31, 32 

K 

Kansas, 42 

Kansas, Miss, 20, 21,60,63,66 
Known to the related un- 
known, from the, 195 

L 

Late entrance and absence, 141 

Law on my side, 39 

Learning to do by doing, 175 

Leisure moments, educating 
for, 224; avenue of escape, 
224; other avenues of escape, 
225, 245 

Library, 73 

Life to live over, if I had, 26 

Longleys, 31-33 

Love for the teacher a pre- 
requisite of learning, 286 

Loving the Golden Locks and 
Lord Fauntleroys, 296 

Luther, Martin, 65 

M 
Managing boys, 104 
Man's integrity not questioned 

by the use of locks, etc., 125 
Manual labor not degrading, 

240, 241 
Manual training, 71, 264 



300 



INDEX 



Mark Tapley, more than an 
ordinary man, 45 

Marshalls, 31, 34 

Martin Chuzzlewit, 45 

Massachusetts, district sys- 
tem, 258 

Mastering myself, 44 

Mathews, 31, 34 

McGuire, MolHe, 60 

McKinley, President, 140 

Memories of happy days, 183 

Men, like hogs, 41 ; emigration 
of rural young, 159; loss of 
character, 1, 160, 184 

Methods of work, order in, 37 

Mistakes in attempting to 
teach, 189; in reading, 195; 
in arithmetic, 200 

Mixed schools, 155 

Money, drawing public funds 
for private use, 26 

Morals must be protected, 187 

Moral support of school board, 

53 
Moral welfare, 185 

Morris, Sam, 105 

Mourners' bench, 98-100 

Music, 216, 224 

N 
Nagging, 108 

Nayson, Simeon, 99, 100, 102 
Natural consequences, law of, 

22 
Nature study, 251, 252 
Notes, insulting or censori- 
ous, 291 

O 

Obedience, absolute, 64, 65 
Obstacles, removing the, 202 
Onward, Christian Soldiers, 20, 

21, 182 

Opportunities for development, 

19; lost, 151; year of, 181 
Our mother, 286 



Our teacher, 282, 286 
Over-indulgence, youth ruined 
by, 122 

P 

Palmer, George Herbert, 33 

Parental responsibility in rural 
places, 253 

Pauper, whom nobody owns, 
156; criminal and, 159 

People, rural and urban — 
differentiating between, 158 

Periscope, not needed, 23 

Physics, 71 

Play, without opportunity to, 
177, 222, 223 

Plays, junior and senior, 174 

Population, 360 millions, 237 

Positions, poorest for the in- 
efficient, 11; lost while con- 
tending for rights, 41 

Predecessors, fault of, 39 

President McKinley and the 
barefoot boy, 140 

Price, for brood animal, 27 

Problems, 59; certain social, 
93; rural social, 94; small 
town, 256 

Program, making of, 48; 
Christmas, 143, 144 

Progress, educational, a back- 
ward step in, 175; confidence 
in, 177 

Providing, pleasure instead of 
depriving of, 128 

Psychology, 74 

Public conscience, 64 

Public meetings, 81 

Public opinion, period for 
forming, 49, 63; in your 
favor, 64; fickleness of, 64; 
unreliable, 108 

Punishment, commensurate 
with the offense, 54; certain, 
swift and unerring, 62 

Pupils, the task of caring for, 
152 



INDEX 



301 



Q 

Quitting school too early, 241 



Rachel, 31, 154, 155 
Reading, proper atmosphere 

for, 196; furnishing good 

books for, 197 
Reading board, 197, 198 
Recommendations, 15 
Redtop Briggs, 295, 296 
Regard for one's fellow man, 

158 

Religious attack, method of, 
37; denominations, 29; 
movement, 92; worship, 28 

Respect for authority and law, 
109 

Responsibility, a teacher's, 
125; a school's, 185; a shift- 
ing of , 2 10, 2 1 1 ; future gener- 
ations to rise to, 237; to edu- 
cate for development of, 238 

Ricketty, ricketty jams, 176 

Rogues, carelessness in busi- 
ness makes, 188 

Room for the teacher with 
common sense, 293 

Rose, Father and Mother, 29, 

33. 99. 154. 199 
Rules, 204, 205, 211 
Rural church, 97, 103, 247 
Rural high schools, should 
maintain high standards, 
239; not necessary to con- 
fine efforts to college prep- 
aration, 239 
Rural leadership, 17 
Rural people, dependent so- 
cially, 95; feeding, not lead- 
ing the world, 234; educa- 
tional advantages for, 235; 
a closer organization among, 
254; are not less sacrificing, 
255; reward incommensur- 
ate with the returns to, 255 



Rural school, a market place 
for cheap labor, 27; a religi- 
ous centre, 29; has not kept 
pace, 36; third place, 37; 
betterment of, left to educa- 
tors, 233; should run nine 
months, 274 

Rural society, criticism offered 
on, 158 

S 

Sabbath, 227 

Scarcity of reading material, 16 

School board, managing the, 
68; meeting of, 78 

School building, repairing, 85; 
used for other purposes 
than school, 90 

School curriculum, revolt of 
the adolescent's mental atti- 
tude toward, 242 

School house, radical im- 
provements of, 88 

School laws, compulsory, 185 

School, preparing for, 13; the 
first day of, 19; city, 36; un- 
controlled is a kindergarten 
for reformatories, 109; two 
types of, 151; the closing of, 
174; one room, the only 
really democratic institu- 
tion, 181; is a moral uplift, 
185; an unfailing sign of a 
poor, 192; of small town, the 
logical centres for rural 
graded schools, 235; school 
unit, 256, 269; term length 

of. 257 

School teaching, a living for 
the incompetent, 190; a 
stepping stone for the ambi- 
tious, 190 

Scrapers, horse drawn, 154 

Second day, 38 

Self, forgetting of and living 
for others, 29, 32 

Shakespeare, William, 75 



302 



INDEX 



Sheep, a problem about, 209 
Short course in high schools, 

275 

Singers, 219 

Singing, opening school with, 
20 

Situation, accepting a bad, 44 

Social evil, 225; instincts, 142; 
life, 139; rural, 87; outcasts, 
must leave the rural com- 
munity, 159; problems, 
rural, 94; city, 94 

Society, best interests of, 93 

Stars, in college, 175; in 
church, 175; all-star com- 
panies, 182 

Starting in early, 42 

Sting, the ever hidden, 220 

Stitch in time, 37 

Stories, fairy, 228 

Story of a backwoods settle- 
ment, 293-296 

Story-telling, reduced tardi- 
ness by, 229; how I managed, 
229; win children's love by, 
229; a gift, 226, 228 

Study period, abused, 200 

Sunday school class, 17; reci- 
tation not worth while, 180 

Supervised play, 187; study 
periods, one of the weak 
places, 200 

Supervision, children's need 
of, 186-188 

Surveying the premises, 70 

Survival of the fittest, 20 

Swimming pool, 70 

Sympathizing with the young 
teacher, 18 

Sympathy, looking for, 30; 
childhood, 180 



Tapley, Mark, 45-47 
Tax levy, increased, 80 
Tax, paid by the few, 253 



Teacher, giving life for an un- 
sympathetic, unappreciative 
public, 24; rural teacher, 
doing the most work, re- 
ceiving the least pay, 26; 
Bossingthe school board, 40; 
pay and holiday, 43; as an 
outsider, 84; a non-resident, 
105; his responsibility as 
seen by a board member, 
132; the present of the, 145; 
as janitor, parent, and nurse, 
153; primary, 195; who does 
nothing, 200; who does all 
the work, 201; who has not 
caught the inspiration of 
the teacher, 215; doing poor- 
ly because she was afraid, 
230; prejudiced against, 
232 

Teaching, the hardest work, 

145 

Text-books, only two good, 25 
Thinkers, independent, 201; 

rules that take precedence 

over thought, 203 
"To the rural teacher," 292 
Town, the small, 27-28 
Towns of 2500 population, 235 
Township system, 257, 260, 

266, 268 
Training for leisure moments, 

233 

Transportation, better means 

of i 255; free, 262 

U 

Uncle Sam expects subordina- 
tion, 41 

United States, Department of 
Agriculture of, 87; able to 
compete with Germany and 
France, 248 

Unkind, cruel teacher, recollec- 
tions of an, 287-291 

Urbanite, the, 158 



INDEX 



308 



Vacation, Christmas, 141; 

weeks following, 148 
Valedictorian, the, who could 

not forget, 221 
Vicariousness, an aptitude for, 

24, 32 

Vicious men, not model pupils, 
108 

Viking-like to head the death 
bark, 24 

Village school, accept a posi- 
tion in, 20 

Visit to a rural school, 230 



Vocational education, a live 
boy with reference to, 243 

W 

Walks, free from mud and 

snow, 152 
Want, never knew, 152 
Water from the spring, 30 
What are the little girls made 

of, 117 
Wixon, Manly, 100-102 



Youth not the time to pre- 
pare for old age, 122 



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